


The Surgery

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [30]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 16:21:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 23,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16768630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: The world is screwed up, and the Animorphs are about to learn why -- a controller has the Time Matrix, a powerful spacetime-altering machine superior in some ways even to Ellimist, and is trying to build a world susceptible to yeerk control. Ellimist can send the Animorphs to retrieve the device, but whether they succeed or fail, a price must be paid -- the life of an Animorph.As with the war, the Animorphs have no choice to go ahead and fight, even if it costs their lives. But who will die, and how will they go on without them? Even if they win, how can they repair their mangled timeline? There's no room to relax, because in this adventure, the Animorphs will have to make a life-and-death decision that nobody expected...





	1. Last Time On animorphs

LAST TIME:

The Animorphs existed in a strange alternate world with no memories of the one we're used to reading them in. Their country is a fascist nightmare, Melissa has replaced Rachel on the team, and David's absent -- both Rachel and David being at an orphanage some distance out of town. When a plan to destroy a Kandrona brings our team back together, they find themselves yanked out of their timeline and their original memories restored... and Ellimist has a lot of explaining to do. 


	2. Chapter 2

<What the everloving fuck,> Tobias asked, <is going on?>

It was a fair question. All seven Animorphs were still pretty dazed, sitting in an open area that looked vaguely like part of the Dry Lands, although not a part I recognised. And right in our midst stood Ellimist, looking sheepish.

“There has been an incident,” he admitted.

<Oh,> Tobias said. <An incident. Right. Because here I thought that I, by which I mean someone, was in the midst of staging a near-suicidal mass breakout in a government orphanage in a fascist Empire with the help of my good friend Melissa Chapman, because I thought that Jake over there was probably going to get a bunch of my childhood friends killed, but it’s nice to know that the whole thing was just ‘an incident’. That explains everything.>

“Is it like that for my parents?” David asked. He hadn’t moved; his palms were still pressed over his eyes while he knelt on the grass. He looked like he was about to throw up. “Is it like that all the time?”

“Yes,” Ellimist said. “I’m sorry.”

“Back to Tobias’ question...” Rachel began.

“An incident,” Ellimist repeated. “It is extremely complicated. And we need your help.”

“Yeah, that sounds pretty typical,” Marco said. “Let me guess, Crayak’s done some spacetime stuff that makes Weird Fascist America and we have to fix it by… I dunno, beating his chosen champion at Doom? Tell me it’s that. I’m pretty good at Doom.”

“As a matter of fact, Crayak is not the current problem,” Ellimist said. “When I said we need your help, I meant just that – ‘we’. Both Crayak and I are in agreement that this problem should be resolved as quickly as possible.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we didn’t waste a couple of days messing around in that weird fascist world, then,” Marco said mildly.

“I apologise for that. The...” Ellimist paused, assembling his sentences carefully. “The… fabric of spacetime is… threadbare here. Yes. It is difficult to put much stress on it without… tearing, you might say.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Rachel commented. He ignored her.

“The safest way to transport you all was in one batch, while you were making physical contact. This, as I’m sure you noticed, took time to transpire.”

“What happened out there?” I asked. “To the fabric of spacetime, and to us, and...”

“There is a device,” Ellimist said. “It is older than myself, and quite possibly older than the universe; I am not sure. It is certainly more powerful than myself or Crayak; not in all ways, but in… certain key ways. It is called the Time Matrix.”

Ellimist paused. We all stared, suitably awed by the presentation. All except Ax, who scoffed.

<Time Matrices aren’t _real_ ,> he said.

“Neither are ellimists,” Ellimist pointed out, raising his brows.

Ax flicked his tail dismissively. <That is entirely different. Ellimist stories were designed to frighten youngsters and, against my expectations, turned out to in fact be based on a real, powerful entity.> He dipped his tail slightly to Ellimist, a shade of wariness still in his bearing. <But a Time Matrix is a different thing entirely.>

“What’s a Time Matrix?” Rachel asked.

<It is a rhetorical device for simplifying physics. It is like… it is like you humans would use a frictionless plane or infinite lever, to remove real-world complications from a basic physics puzzle. When you are running time travel calculations, you use a Time Matrix in this way. It is a hypothetical subtemporally grounded time travel device.>

“A what now?” Jake asked.

<Travelling backwards in time is theoretically possible even for us non-Ellimists, as I am sure you remember from the Amazon, Prince Jake. But it is almost never used, even in war, because it almost always kills the time traveller. The calculations involved to avoid the various kinds of paradox and causal stressors are simply beyond anything that perceives reality on the level of an andalite or a human, no matter how intelligent; asking one of us to safely travel to yesterday and change something is like asking an ant to safely cross the Atlantic Ocean. Some scientists have suggested that subtemporal grounding, in particular rare circumstances, might be theoretically possible, but – >

“So it’s a paradox-free time machine,” Marco said.

<That would be an extreme simplification.>

Marco looked at Ellimist.

“But close enough for our purposes, so far as the current dilemma goes,” Ellimist admitted. “Aximili is correct; andalites do use the Time Matrix as a rhetorical device for physics. Many species who teach time travel physics as a theoretical concept do. But this doesn’t preclude its actual existence, any more than Newtonian physics precludes the possible future discovery of actual frictionless planes.”

“No, but I think thermodynamics does,” Marco said.

“What’s thermodynamics?” I asked, which was ignored.

<Our scientists have run the calculations,> Ax said, <and with the size limitation imposed by the Planck constant, a rudimentary Time Matrix, even if it were possible to construct, would be larger than the universe.>

“The device would be,” Ellimist agreed, “but its control mechanism wouldn’t. And if the wrong person got hold of such a control mechanism...”

<Oh.>

“I’m going to be honest with you guys,” I said, “I am understanding basically none of this.”

<Me neither,> Tobias admitted.

“So far as I can make out,” Marco said, “somebody stole a time machine, and now Ellimist and Crayak are pissed off because time is _their_ toy. That about right?”

“It is… complicated.” Ellimist sounded a little miffed.

“How did you let someone steal a time machine?” Rachel asked, frowning.

“It is – ”

“Complicated.”

“Yes. The Time Matrix has a way of getting itself discovered and used.”

“You said spacetime is threadbare or whatever. I’m guessing they’re not playing by the rules of the game, are they?” I asked.

“They do not know them. They have no understanding of the implications of their actions. They don’t understand the risks, and they are a major risk to this planet.”

I remembered the other Cassie, and shuddered.

“And you need us to help?” Rachel asked. “Why? I get that you and Crayak have your game, but if you’re in agreement on this, why not just go in there and turn this guy to paste or whatever with your combined power? You’re like billions of times stronger than us.”

“Strength is often not a matter of raw power but of… position,” Ellimist said.

“Like a squirrel perched next to a nice lamp,” I said. Ellimist smiled at me. Everyone else looked at me like I was nuts.

“Spacetime is fragile, and this thing is dangerous and better at manipulating time than you,” Jake said. “So you need someone to go in on a more basic level. You want us to find this guy and physically retrieve the device for you.”

“Yes.”

“Then what? What are you going to do with it?”

“I cannot, in fact, touch it. But I would very strongly caution you not to play around with it yourselves. That sort of power is far more dangerous than it seems, and changes that seem small to you might be devastating in ways you cannot calculate.” He met my gaze. “A butterfly does not necessarily intend to cause a tornado when she flaps her wings, but hundreds of people might still die in it without her knowledge.”

“Who found it?” David asked.

“A controller. Sub-visser forty seven. He was digging about the construction site near the mall and stumbled upon it by accident. Once he discovered its potential, he went about building a world that would be easier for the yeerks to conquer; specifically, one which _he_ would be able to more easily conquer, and become legendary among his people.”

“Yeeah,” Marco said. “That… that sounds like something we might want to prevent.”

“So how does this work?” Jake asked.

“I can attune you to the resonance of the Time Matrix, starting at the moment on Saturday when it was first used. This means that you will be… how can I put it… under its protective shield, as if you were touching the device when it is used. You won’t have control, of course, but you will be pulled through time in its wake, going wherever it goes. And your own personal histories would be… buffered, as if you were using it.”

“We’d be us, wherever we went?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, let’s get going,” Rachel said, getting up and dusting her hands together.

“There is one other thing?”

<Isn’t there always?> Tobias asked.

“Crayak and I may be in agreement that this needs to be resolved, but not necessarily over the method. He has demanded a price from you, for me empowering you in this way.”

“What does he want?” I asked.

Ellimist took his time answering. His vast, empty gaze moved over each of us in turn.

“He demands an Animorph,” he said. “If you accept, one of your lives will be forfeit.”


	3. Chapter 3

We stared for several seconds.

“Well then,” Marco said. “Glad you could stop by, good luck finding someone to fix this mess. Please be gentle dropping us back at the orphanage.”

“I think we should do it,” Jake said.

Marco stared at him. “I’m sorry. What?”

“I think it’s worth it,” he said. “The survivors are going to hate themselves for it forever, but it’s better than letting that place exist.”

“I agree,” Marco said, “in theory. But that other place isn’t going to exist. If Crayak wants this solved too, but he’s not letting Ellimist empower us to solve it, it means there’s other options, other people they can call on. Let it be their problem.”

“Are there?” I asked Ellimist.

“There are others in a position to help,” he admitted, “but they are all Crayak’s servants. Enlisting their help would put the Time Matrix under Crayak’s control. He cannot touch or use it any more than I can, but...”

“But that isn’t ideal,” Rachel said. “I think – ”

“Before you say anything, Rachel,” Jake cut in, “I think we should vote differently than normal. Normally, we take a vote, and do whatever wins. But I don’t think we should force anyone to do this, not if there’s a guaranteed death involved. Whoever votes no stays behind.”

<That sounds fair,> Tobias said.

“I vote we all stay behind,” Marco said.

“Sorry, Marco,” Rachel said, “but I’m going.”

“That’s a bad idea,” Jake said. “You should stay behind.”

Rachel frowned at him and crossed her arms. “Excuse me? I should what now?”

Jake reddened. “I just… I just mean...”

“You ‘just mean’ what? I should sit on my hands while you go off to save the world? What am I supposed to do, cook you a nice hot meal for when you get home?”

“Hey, come on Rachel, you know I’m not like that. I just think this mission won’t require everyone, is all.”

“Ah, yes, the mission where we have to defeat a time traveller that the two cosmic superpowers who won’t stop messing with our lives are afraid of; surely that will only need a few Animorphs.”

<You’re wasting your breath, Jake,> Tobias said. <You should know better by now.> He was on Rachel’s shoulder, and nuzzled her ear with his beak. <I’m going, too, of course.>

“Of course,” Rachel murmured.

<I will not shirk such a task,> Ax added.

“Hey, hang on,” Jake protested. “This isn’t even your fight, Ax! This is a human thing!”

Ax cocked his head. <A ‘human thing’? How so?>

“Jake,” I said, “are you trying to sacrifice yourself?”

He crossed his arms. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh my god, you are! Guys, he’s trying to sacrifice himself! That’s why he’s trying to talk everyone else out of this and pulling this ‘let’s vote differently’ thing! He was all gung-ho to go, and now he wants the rest of us to drop out so he’s the only choice for Crayak!”

“This isn’t anybody else’s problem!” Jake protested.

“Oh, but it’s yours?” Rachel asked.

“Somebody’s got to do it! Do you have a better idea?”

“Yeah, I do, actually. It’s kind of like yours, only instead of sending one dorky teenager off against a freaking time traveller, we send an entire unit who have been fighting a war together for a couple of years now. I have this crazy suspicion that it might work a bit better.”

Jake looked away. “After everything with that other Rachel, I just think it’d be better if you didn’t – ”

“She doesn’t exist!” Rachel snapped, throwing her arms up. “I do! I’m going!”

“You’re all nuts,” Marco said. “I mean, I’m going if anyone else is going, but we shouldn’t.”

“Me, too, obviously,” I said.

“And me,” David said, his voice wobbly.

“No, you should stay home,” Marco said.

David glared at him. “I’m not a coward, Marco. I only remember being that controller for a couple of days, but I… remember _remembering_ longer. I knew there were risks when I signed up to this fight, and now I just want to fight the yeerks even more. You think I’m going to let those slugs beat us with _time travel_ because I’m scared of a one-in-seven risk? Not likely.”

“I wasn’t calling you a coward,” Marco said calmly. “I’m just saying that if you come, you could get us all killed. If we agree to this, our own selves are buffered. So whether we win or lose, no matter what kind of world we end up in, we’d still be us, with all our memories and personalities.” he glanced at Ellimist. “Right?”

Ellimist nodded.

“Okay. So if we can’t stop this guy and end up in Weird Fascist World, we’ll be there as us. Which sounds kind of dangerous all round, but in your case, David, you’d be a morph-capable controller who knows the histories and identities of all six of us. You’d get us killed.”

“Fuck you, Marco,” David said, his lip curling. “That’s not a risk, because there’s absolutely no way I’m going to end up back in that world. If it comes to that, Crayak can have me, because I am never going to be a controller again. I’m going.”

“Jake?” I asked.

He sighed. “Obviously.” He looked to Ellimist. “I guess that’s it, then. I guess we’re all in on this one.”

Ellimist nodded. “If you would all resume physical contact with each other, please, I can establish resonance.”

I took Jake’s hand in my right, Rachel’s in my left. Other Animorphs moved into place, linking hands. It felt like some kind of weird ritual; a bunch of teenagers, and alien and a hawk gathered under a starlit sky, all forming a circle to allow the impossible to happen. And as one would expect for such a ritual, there would be a blood sacrifice. The cost of this power was an Animorph.

Marco gently wrapped his fingers around Ax’s wrist, completing the circle. In the middle, Ellimist dropped his staff to the ground and raised both hands. The blue glow of his skin brightened and spread until it was all I could see. I squeezed my eyes shut, squeezed my friends’ hands.

And then the glow was gone, and I was digging my own nails into my palms. I was on my back, my neck wet with blood, while above me, something that wasn’t human screamed.


	4. Chapter 4

My eyes flew open, and I instinctively rolled out of the way of the horse hooves that were thundering down towards me. It was the horse that had screamed; my appearance in its path had startled it, and a moment after I’d rolled out of its way, both front hooves landed squarely where my head had been. I noticed with relief that it wasn’t blood I was covered with, but mud; I could smell blood, certainly, but too distant and dilute to be lying in it. The rain drummed steadily down, washing the parts of me that weren’t touching the ground and significantly dirtying the parts of me that were.

Rachel was nearby, lying in the mud as I was. I met her eyes. She hadn’t rolled; while her forearms and legs were in the mud, the rest of her was relatively clean, sporting more of a grunge look than eldritch swamp creature. She didn’t meet my gaze very long; her attention was taken up by the incredibly large horse beside me. The somewhat armoured horse. The horse carrying the rather more heavily armoured man.

The horse had been brought back under the man’s control, mostly. His temper had not. He drew a sword that looked a lot weightier and more solid than anything I’d seen in any movie.

“Sorcieres!” he roared, his voice muffled by a visor.

“What’s he saying?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know! I don’t speak French.”

“He’s speaking French? Wait, don’t you take French?”

“I took one semester of French, and I was bad at it, which is why I no longer take French. Even if I was great at it, the chance that knights-and-swords-era French would be close enough to modern French for me to – ”

The knight’s furious probably-French drowned me out. He was pointing his sword at Rachel. She raised her hands.

“Chill,” she said. “No problem here. Just a couple of wet girls from the future out on a walk.” She looked at me. “Did you see the others?”

“I haven’t seen anything you haven’t seen,” I shrugged.

“Anglaises?” the knight shouted.

“I know that word!” I exclaimed, feeling pleased with myself despite the circumstances. “It means ‘English’.”

“Anglaises! Espionnes!”

“English spies,” I translated, grinning.

Rachel squinted at me. “Cassie, when somebody points a sword at you and shouts ‘English spies’, I don’t think it’s a compliment.” She glared up at the knight. “Sir, just how stupid do you think your enemy is? Why the hell would the English send teenage girls wearing fabric that doesn’t exist yet to spy on a battlefield?”

I cleared my throat. “Actually, Rachel, this is way too quiet to be a battlefield; we’re probably just outside a military camp. There’s usually quite a lot of women in a military camp.” I blushed. “And, uh, there are some camp activities for which barely-clothed women make excellent spies.”

“What do – ” Rachel’s eyes widened. “Ugh, that’s gross. You, sir knight, are gross. Cassie, since when do you know about military camps? Has my cousin been talking your ear off? You can just tell him to shut up, you know.”

“A moi! A moi!” the red knight yelled, still pointing his sword at us. Through the heavy rain, I saw the vague shapes of other people approaching.

“What do we do?” I hissed at Rachel.

“Morph?”

“One of those guys might be the controller! We can’t morph!”

“The chances of that are basically nil. Besides, if anyone shouts ‘andalite!’, we just kill them.”

“We can’t kill random people! Anyway, controller or not, these guys will kill us if they see us morphing!”

She shrugged. “Surrender and wait for an opportunity then? They won’t kill us outright. They’ll take us somewhere to interrogate – ”

“Ce sont des sorcieres anglaises,” the knight said. Not to us; to another knight who had ridden up. This one had a lot of green livery, and was helmetless. His face was scarred with lots of little dots – signs of an old pox, I supposed. He glared down at us.

“English?” he demanded.

“Yes,” I said. Trying to explain the future existence of America would not, I predicted, be a productive conversation.

“We’re lost,” Rachel said. “Where are we?”

The knight frowned, clearly puzzled. “Explain?”

“We need to know where we are,” Rachel continued patiently. She spoke clearly, carefully, making sure every syllable was well-formed – I wasn’t sure whether she was trying to be considerate to the translator, or condescending.

It took me a second to realise that she was being neither. She was speaking very carefully because she didn’t want her voice to betray the slow growth of her jaw. She was already significantly larger than a teenage girl should plausibly be, and had sunk down into the mud to look as inconspicuous as possible.

“Rachel!” I hissed, “You’re not – ”

She was. And as her skin started to gray and her nose grew, the knights noticed.

If I had been a knight in whatever-time-we-were-in and a pretty foreign girl had suddenly started turning into a giant gray animal I’d surely never seen or heard of, I’d probably have fled as fast as my horse could carry me. These guys didn’t do that. The two knights, now flanked by several other French soldiers, readied their swords and charged.

“Look out!” I shouted. Rachel tried to roll out of the way, but her weight was uneven and her muscles and bones weren’t all coordinated yet; she stumbled and slipped sideways into the mud. I kicked out wildly with all my strength, and through pure luck, managed to hit one of the horses square in the knee. The horse screamed and stumbled; I felt something in my foot crack. The pain would have been paralysing if I hadn’t had so much experience with it; instead, I was already morphing leopard, and the pain faded as the foot shrunk and bones reassembled.

The other knight struck down at Rachel. His blade sank through leathery skin and chipped into a skull far thicker than anything that should be in a human head, but didn’t cut through. Rachel was almost the size of a horse – the other soldiers, in far less armor and without horses, fled.

One knight fought to get his horse under control. The other struggled to lever his sword out of Rachel’s skull. It gave her just enough time for two huge tusks to shoot out of her face.

Rachel trumpeted a half-human, half-elephant roar of triumph.

<You think you can take me?! Come on! Come at me!>

She was still growing rapidly, and the knights decided that they did not wish to come at her. They rather hurriedly found other places to be.

“Okay, Rachel, I think they got whatever point you were trying to make,” I hissed, my face still mostly human. “Now demorph! We should get small before they bring reinforcements!”

Rachel continued to grow. <I will not be small!> she told me. <I will not let some random knights lock me up somewhere because I’m inconvenient! Nobody is going to lock me up anywhere or so much as lay a hand on me ever again, because I have the power to defend myself all back, baby!> She trumpeted again, much closer to full elephant this time.

Oh. Right. Rachel’s life hadn’t been so great for the past couple of days.

My ears finished reforming as leopard ears, and the sound of approaching footsteps jumped into my awareness.

<Rachel,> I said, <we need to move! People are – >

“Do I even want to know what happened here?” Jake asked wearily, walking into view.


	5. Chapter 5

<Hi, Jake,> I said sheepishly, finishing my morph. <Hi, Marco,> I added as he came up alongside Jake.

<Hi, boys,> Rachel said, not sounding guilty at all.

Jake’s eyes picked up the sword still lodged in her skull. He frowned. “Who hurt you?”

<Just some knights. They went for a walk.>

<Can we do the same?> I asked.

<Are you mad?> Rachel asked as we started moving away from the area, demorphing as we moved.

“So there we were,” Jake said conversationally, “appearing among a bunch of guys in tents, all done up in armor. Naturally I figure, we should be stealthy, sneak out, not alert our foe to the fact that we’re here. But naturally, what I should have done is gone huge and started threatening random people.”

<You are mad.>

“Mad? Why would I be mad? Here I am thinking, ‘great, we just snuck past the guards,’ and suddenly I hear an _elephant_?”

<I think he might be mad,> Rachel said to me in what would have been the mental equivalent of a whisper if she wasn’t obviously including Jake and Marco in the conversation.

“I know we’ve all got this Crayak’s price hanging over our heads, but can we try to stay alive a little longer than this? Please? At least long enough to stop this controller from… doing whatever he’s doing here?”

<What is he doing here?> I asked. <Where even are we?>

“No idea.”

“Come on, Jake!” Marco clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re the war guy! You know, like, everything about military structure, and every battleship ever built – ”

“And if you can find a battleship, Marco, I’d be happy to tell you what kind it is. But this area does seem to be somewhat lacking in battleships, for some reason.” He pointedly surveyed the muddy ground of the medeival… war camp, or wherever we were.

<It’s got French knights,> Rachel said. <I think they’re fighting the English.> She stopped walking; she’d reached that stage during demorph where it was impossible to reliably keep balance on changing legs. We all stopped with her.

“Which narrows it down to maybe half a billion wars none of us have ever heard of,” Jake said.

<Which ones are likely to be historically important, as far as building a fascist empire where America is goes?> I asked.

“I don’t know! I don’t know what happened between the French and the English!”

“Should we maybe find out?” Marco asked.

<The English camp is about two miles North,> Tobias’ voice told us, making me jump.

<Tobias!>

<Hi, Rachel. Thanks for signalling your location by being an elephant, that made you way easier to find. You guys might want to move a bit faster, by the way; there’s a whole bunch of French guys looking for you.>

“Birds,” Jake ordered. He immediately started to shrink. “I guess our highest priority is finding the controller before he can change anything.”

<What did Jake say?>

Rachel told him.

<Actually, I don’t think that’s going to be the issue. I already found him. Well… a little bit.>

<What do you mean ‘a little bit’?>

“You guys should probably see for yourselves.”


	6. Chapter 6

By ‘a little bit’, Tobias meant half. He’d found half of the controller.

<Well then,> Marco said, wheeling above the legs and hips of a man, dressed in startlingly modern jeans and sneakers. <That… that sure is something.>

<What’s going on here?> Jake asked.

<He’s probably trying to blend in,> Marco said.

<By being dead?!>

<No, by being in a contemporary host. We’re fighting a yeerk, remember? He probably switched hosts, killed this guy in… a pretty brutal fashion, it seems… and then headed off to do whatever he’s here to do.>

<So he’s going to be impossible to find,> Rachel moaned. <Great. This is just freaking great.>

<Hey, it’s what we do,> I said, trying to sound optimistic. <We fight hidden enemies.>

<We’re pretty close to the English camp,> Tobias said. <So I think he’s probably an English soldier.>

<See, our suspects are already cut in half!> I said cheerfully, then looked down at the legs and immediately regretted my choice of words.

<Come on,> Jake said wearily. <Let’s find this controller and get out of here.> He wheeled around toward the English camp. The rest of us followed. I tried not to think about the possibility of some peasant in one of the camps noticing a bunch of birds of prey that he’d never seen or heard of before hanging out over their camp. It’d be taken as an omen, probably.

Assuming we were in England. If we were in France, the English probably wouldn’t know what the local birds looked like.

<Are those legs going to cause timeline problems?> Rachel asked. <Do you think any soldiers are going to see them and be like ‘oh hey, denim jeans, great idea, let’s invent denim’?>

<If they do, maybe we’ll make a present-day world with incredibly advanced fashion,> I said. <It’ll catapult them into the future, so our present will have… I dunno, silver miniskirts, like in those old space movies?>

<Silver miniskirts? Seriously, Cassie? I can guarantee that the future will not feature – >

<Is this the kind of thing girls talk about?> Marco asked. <Lame.>

<Sorry, Marco, didn’t realise we might be interrupting your oh-so-intellectual internal musing on whether Batman could beat Spider-Man,> Rachel said.

<Hardly intellectual. He could,> Marco said, <no problem. But if they’re fighting it’s because Peter’s been set up by one of his villains, which happens all the time, and Bruce has to deal with that a lot too and would understand immediately as soon as the villain jumps in to – >

<Watch out for the sentry,> Tobias said. <We should spread out a bit so we’re not a bunch of birds of prey all flying together.>

But the sentry, as it turned out, did not need to be watched for. He looked straight at us, eyes flitting from bird to bird. There was something weird about him. He was a white guy, like most of the camp, and looked about mid-20s, like quite a lot of the camp. He was dressed in worn but carefully mended, grubby clothing, and there was dirt on his hair and face, but the parts that weren’t dirtied were a lot cleaner than the other soldiers, and he didn’t have any of the old pox scars or similar marks that a lot of the soldiers sported. He smiled, and his teeth were white and perfect. He lifted a couple of fingers in subtle greeting.

<Oh, you’re okay,> Jake said, sounding relieved. <I was all ready to conduct a search. Have you found Ax?>

<He’s watching for you on the other side of the camp,> David replied. <You’ll hear him soon enough, he checks in every thirty seconds or so to make sure I’m not dead. Dude’s pretty jumpy for an alien soldier.>

<David, are you well?> Ax asked, right on cue. <If there is difficulty – >

<The others are here,> David said. <All of them, I think.>

<Prince Jake! What is the plan?>

<I don’t know yet, Ax-Man. Our controller has switched hosts and we have no idea who or where he is. I don’t even know what battle this is, or who we want to win it.>

<Oh, that’s easy,> David piped up. <This is Agincourt.>

<Agey-what?> Rachel asked.

<Agincourt. French versus English. 1415.> He wrinkles his nose. <Shakespeare wrote a play about it.>

<David’s a secret nerd,> Marco marvelled. <Who knew?>

<You wish, Marco. Some of my family are just way into Shakespeare.>

<David,> Jake cut in, <do you know how this battle is supposed to go?>

<I know how Shakespeare wrote it to go. But he takes a lot of liberties, so...> David shrugged. <Our dudes over here, this teeny army lead by Henry V, are gonna turn that much bigger French army to paste. It’ll be awesome.>

<They’re not ‘our dudes’,> Jake pointed out. <This isn’t our war.>

<Yeah, but they’re supposed to win, and this controller will want to stop them, right? That makes them our dudes.>

<He might,> Marco said. <He might do something else, like… I dunno, kill Abraham Lincoln’s distant ancestor, or...> he drifted off in thought.

<Or kill Henry V,> Jake said. <Okay. Marco, Ax, Cassie; find Henry V and protect him. Do not take unnecessary risks, not even to protect the king. Rachel, Tobias, David and I are looking for the controller and the Time Matrix. Everyone keep an ear out in case there’s a more complicated plan at play here.>

<You want me on bodyguard duty and Rachel doing the stealth investigation?> Marco asked.

<I can do stealth just fine!>

<Didn’t you just nearly call the French army down on yourself by turning into an elephant?>

<That was different. We’d already been caught.>

<Everyone stop talking to me at once,> Jake said, sounding distracted. <Okay, fine – Rachel and I will guard the King; David and Ax will keep an eye out for anything unusual that might indicate other plans; Marco, Cassie and Tobias will look for the controller and Time Matrix. Is everyone happy with those groups? Can we all move on now?>

<Sure thing, _Dad_ ,> Rachel grumbled.

<Yes, Prince Jake,> Ax said, sounding sheepish (although I wasn’t sure why).

<Let’s get to work,> David said.

<Good. Come on, Rachel, let’s find this king.>

  



	7. Chapter 7

How do you find an enemy who could look like anyone?

That, I supposed, was a game we’d been playing with the yeerks from the beginning. Both sides hid ourselves inside other forms, in different ways. But it was never like this. At home, we were surrounded by people and any of them could be one of many controllers; identification was a matter of following and clearing people one by one. Finding yeerks had never actually been that important; we’d always been more interested in finding people who weren’t controlled by yeerks. Controller-until-proved-otherwise was the best policy.

This was different. We weren’t surrounded by unknown enemies, trying to locate safe bystanders. We were surrounded by safe bystanders, trying to locate one single enemy. A needle in a haystack. And that was a lot harder; at home, the majority of people around us occupied a nebulous space of maybe-enemies that we could mostly disregard so long as we didn’t do anything stupid around them, but here, we couldn’t disregard anyone. We had to find this controller. Preferably before he enacted his plan.

<If he’s going to kill the king,> I asked after about thirty minutes of random scouting from the sky, <can’t we just scout around the king?>

<Jake thinks he’s going to kill the king,> Tobias said, <but we have no real reason to think that. Jake just thinks everything’s about kings and generals and big leaders. If I were using a time travel device to kill a king, I’d do it when he was at home in bed, not getting ready to go into battle. It could be like Marco said; that he’s here to kill someone’s ancestor. Or maybe he wants England to lose this battle, but he’s gonna sabotage horses or something instead of kill their leader. Of maybe he’s here to pick up some really famous artefact, like a famous sword or whatever, to bring it to the present day and sell it for millions. Who knows?>

<Well,> I said, <which of those would change the future the most, do you think?>

<Doesn’t matter,> Marco said. <Whatever cause-and-effect calculations we try to do have zero relevance here.>

<I know history is way too complicated to boil down to single past actions, no matter what the history books say,> I conceded, <but somehow, that controller figured it out.>

<No, he didn’t.>

<Marco, you were just in that horrible alternate timeline. How can you say – >

<Oh, he changed time. But I really doubt he wanted it like that. Think – you’re a yeerk, given ultimate power over time. What would you do? Fill America with nazis-under-a-different-name and have them go to war with Brazil? How did any of that help the yeerks?>

<They seemed to be infiltrating the system pretty well,> I pointed out.

<And humanity was just barely inventing computers in that timeline,> Tobias added. <We had far worse tech, so we’d be easier to conquer.>

<If that was the goal, why give us that much tech at all? Why not leave humanity in the stone age? Sure, there’d be a lot less of us, but humans are really good at growing our population really fast. Blast humanity back to nothing every time they invent something more complicated than the wheel, show up with yeerk tech in the modern day, take it over before anyone knows what’s happening.>

<You wouldn’t even have to do that,> I said thoughtfully. <I mean, at that point, cool, but you’re still at war with the andalites. Why not deal with that?>

<Yeah! The Time Matrix could win the war for the yeerks! Maybe that’s the plan after conquering Earth?>

<No, they could avoid the war altogether. Go back in time to before the yeerks ever met andalites, teach your own people to build spaceships and kandronas, and lead your people out to take over the galaxy at their own pace as quietly as possible. All this meddling about with Earth’s history is unnecessary.>

<That’d involve leaving all your friends and family behind forever in the future,> Tobias pointed out. <I can see why he’d want to make it, you know, a present-day sort of thing.>

<Still, there are lots of less complicated ways to do it,> Marco said. <Which tells us a lot, really.>

<Our yeerk is an idiot,> Tobias concluded.

<He has a different motive,> I suggested. <Not conquering the earth for yeerks.> Beneath us, the soldiers were assembling for a pre-battle mass. I raked my osprey gaze over them, trying to discern something suspicious – a knowing look, an air of nervousness, a sense of ulterior purpose. Pointless, of course – it was a mass before a big battle. All three were in abundance.

<Maybe. But I think it’s more that there are some things he can’t do. Or I should say, some ways things have to go. I think maybe time doesn’t work the way we humans, and probably also yeerks, think it does. I don’t think cause and effect are so, you know, linear.>

<That’s… kind of a broad claim,> Tobias said doubtfully. <I still think he’s just an idiot.>

<There’s more to it than that. You remember in the barn, in that other world? I couldn’t help but notice that we were – >

<Found him!> I reported. <Over there, behind that tent.>

Our target looked, in most respects, like everyone else. He had ragged, lice-ridden hair, very worn clothes, and knew exactly what he was doing as he banked the fire. He’d made one singular mistake; one he probably wouldn’t have made if he’d known that we were along for the ride. He’d taken something very useful from his previous host.

As we watched, he checked the time on his shiny wristwatch once again, dusted off his trousers, and filed over for mass.


	8. Chapter 8

<How did he even set that thing?> Tobias wondered. <There are no other clocks to set it by.>

<Maybe the Time Matrix brings you to whatever time you ask it to, locally?> I pondered. <I mean, it’s operable by lowly species like humans and yeerks, so it must be really user-friendly, right? We should… we should get the others.>

We followed the controller to mass. Like us, Jake and Rachel were watching from the sky; Ax and David were assembled among the soldiers, trying not to look too bored. Ax was idly chewing on something. I hoped it was food.

<Found our controller,> I reported. <He’s wearing a shiny wristwatch.>

<A wristwatch?> Rachel asked. <How did he set it?>

<That’s what I said!> Tobias exclaimed.

<Well, I guess we can ask him when we pound him into paste,> Rachel said.

<Hold on, Rachel,> Jake said. <We can’t just charge in, claws drawn.>

<Why not? Even if he’s got a Dracon beam, it’s like, one dude. We take him down, take the Time Matrix, go home. Easiest mission ever.>

<Ax,> Jake asked, <what does a Time Matrix look like?>

<I do not know. In physics, the concept does not have to ‘look like’ anything.>

<Well, that’s just great.>

<All we have to do,> Jake said, <is follow this guy until he decides to leave, and follow him to the Time Matrix. Then we can jump him and take it.>

<He could mess up history in all kinds of ways before then,> David pointed out.

<Doesn’t matter,> Tobias said. <Once we have the Time Matrix, we can put everything back together.>

<What makes you think that’s going to be possible?> David asked. <Anything we change back could make things worse. Stepping on the wrong bug destroying the future and all that.>

<I don’t think it works that way,> Marco said. <I think history’s more resilient than that. Or… incomprehensible, at least. I don’t think cause and effect works how we think it does, at least not with the Time Matrix.>

<Look,> Tobias said, <just because this guy’s an idiot doesn’t mean – >

<No, it’s not just that. It’s… remember back at the barn, in the other place?>

<What about it?>

<Why were we there? Why was there even a barn? Why did Cassie’s family still own it? Why were we Animorphs – why did we even exist?>

<This is weirdly existential for you, Marco,> Rachel mused.

<No, I’m being perfectly practical. Why should we exist in an alternate future, let alone be Animorphs? Somehow, in that other world, five Animorphs are the same people, and the other two and Melissa Chapman all still exist. Do you guys understand how insane that is? My mom crossed the border illegally as a little kid. Her parents wanted a better life for her. It was really, really dangerous. I’m supposed to believe that in the world of that fascist Empire, she still ended up in the land we call the USA, married the same guy, had the same kid? That all your parents also just happened to meet and have the same kids at the same time in basically the same conditions, evil Empire aside? That’s nuts! I mean, reproduction alone – Cassie, how many genes does a human have?>

<I don’t know,> I said, trying to keep up. <Thousands, at least? The definition of ‘gene’ is actually a lot looser than – >

<Thousands, good enough. Thousands of little bits of information telling us what sex we are, what hair color we have, how long our fingers and toes are, and rolling the dice happened to come up with the same combinations for all of us twice? No.>

<We don’t know that those people were genetically identical to us,> I pointed out. <I mean, they must have been similar, since we all looked pretty much the same, but – >

<Let’s take sex,> Marco said. <Fifty-fifty chance, right?>

<In humans, yes.>

<Right. Ax – andalite gender. Is it random, with a fifty-fifty chance?>

<It is more complicated than for humans, but yes.>

<Okay. So, all other things being equal, taking it as a given that my parents met and fell in love and got married in about the same place, taking it as given that they had a kid on the exact same date, the chances of Marco instead of Maria sitting in that barn is fifty per cent. Add Jake instead of Jacinta – twenty five per cent. Cassie instead of – >

<Is this just an excuse to come up with opposite-sex names for all of us?> Rachel asked.

<The chances of all the Animorphs being the same gender are one in one hundred and twenty eight,> Marco said. <That’s… what, about four-fifths of a per cent? That’s not counting Melissa. Or Tom, Jordan or Sara. Or any of our parents. Or – >

<We get it,> Jake broke in. <The chances of us being us were vanishingly small.>

<’Vanishingly small’ doesn’t begin to touch on the situation.>

<So you think it’s what, some kind of trick or test or something?> Rachel asked.

<Maybe. Maybe Ellimist is messing with us. Maybe he isn’t, and it’s our perspective that’s off; cause and effect doesn’t work how we think it does. Maybe it’s something to do with how the Time Matrix works; the operator’s past was ‘buffered’ like ours is now, and it’s somehow important to his past that five of the Animorphs are the same people, and we all exist with basically the same family structures. I don’t know. None of us know anything. That’s what I’m worried about.>

<I don’t think the past paradox protection works like that,> I said, <because he was able to erase America, no problem. That should be more important to his past than the identities of the Animorphs, right?>

<I don’t know,> Marco said. <I don’t know how any of this works. All I know is our model is really off, somehow.>

<Guys, something’s happening,> Tobias cut in. I brought my attention back to the controller, who was sidling his way to the edge of the gathering, earning a few dirty looks. He made it to the edge, reached into his coat, and withdrew something else that he must have taken off his previous host.

Nobody looked alarmed as he withdrew the Dracon beam. Why would they? It was a grubby lump of something, covered in mud, but it certainly looked nothing like any weapon they would have ever seen. It wasn’t until he aimed it around the crowd, straight at King Henry, that anyone reacted.

  


But he had already fired.

<The King!> Jake exclaimed.

<Forget the King! Save the Controller!> Marco insisted. <If he dies without showing us the Time Matrix, we’re trapped!>

There was no time to morph. Diving down into the crowd mobbing the controller would be suicide. Instead, I cobbled together every negative emotion I could drag up and shoved it at the crowd, but through their adrenalin and mine, it wasn’t enough. I was still so unpracticed at this, I…

… was slammed with a sudden wall of grief and hopelessness. Below me, the mob forgot their target and started to panic.

<Ax,> Jake said tersely, <fix your aim.>

<Sorry, Prince Jake.> The feeling lifted.

Marco bellowed, <BEHOLD, I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD. UNHAND MY SERVANT.> To us, he said, <If there’s a hell, we’re going there, aren’t we?>

<Speak for yourself,> Rachel grumbled. <You’re the one who decided to be God.>

<Ax, some positive emotions to back up Marco, I think,> Jake said. <Cassie, get down there and give them a show. Try not to tip off our controller that you’re human.>

That didn’t seem to be a worry; our controller was focused on trying to slip out of the crowd unnoticed. A calm peace settled over the area; even to me, who knew the thoughtspeak trick, it felt mystical. I landed next to the priest, spread my wings, and started to grow.

<THIS IS A HOLY BATTLE,> Marco invented wildly, while David mused, <How on earth are we going to fix all this later?>

<That’s a problem for later,> Jake said. <David, Rachel, Tobias we’re following this controller and getting the Time Matrix. The rest of you, keep distracting.>

<THE TIME OF MY HOLY KINGDOM IS AT HAND. Quick, guys, have any of you ever read the bible? Got any handy quotes for me?>

By this point, I was an almost human-sized osprey. I let most of my body become human in shape, still covered by feathers, but kept the wings. <Is our controller friend out of sight?>

<Oh, well and truly.>

Feathers melted into my skin, forming a pretty pattern which slowly faded away. I spread my wings, opened my eyes, and smiled as beautifically as I could to the staring crowd. Everyone took a couple of steps back, and about a third of them actually fell to their knees.

<YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO OBTAIN THIS HOLY VICTORY. YOUR, UH, YOUR FAITH PLEASES THE LORD YOUR GOD. ALL THE, UM, WORSHIP, AND, UH, HYMNS – >

And then, the world changed.

  



	9. Chapter 9

The sensation was familiar. The glow, the disorientation, and me, human again, lying in the mud while rain drizzled miserably around me.

I opened my eyes. On the plus side, we’d moved forward in time – guns existed now, although I wasn’t sure what kind they were. Even better, none of them were pointed at me.

The scene before me was a handful of ragged men in military uniform. It was fairly dark, which might be why none of them had noticed a spandex-clad teenage girl suddenly appear in the mud nearby. I decided to not be Rachel and rolled under a nearby bush to morph osprey again.

When I took to the sky, it became clear that we were, indeed, with another army. What was it with people who thought that the most important events in history were all wars? The people in this group were whiter than King Henry’s army (and they’d been mostly white people), and they were clearly in the middle of some kind of military action, because they were all men and all soldiers; this was no war camp. Their rough cotton clothes were so muddied that it was difficult in some cases to tell what colour they were; they wore leather boots and clambered into wooden rafts at the edge of an icy river. In short, we were more modern than Henry V, but this wasn’t the modern day.

Jake and Marco were easy to spot. Jake hadn’t even morphed, and Marco had done so just enough to whiten his skin a bit. They were dressed in ill-fitting muddy clothes, and apart from being a little on the young side, they blended in to the army pretty well. They were standing a little apart from everyone else, having a very intense conversation. I was about to announce myself when I caught a few words.

“ – seriously, Jake, you’re telling me you don’t see it?”

“Marco, these crazy conspiracy theories are – ”

“Are you actually this obtuse?! Crayak has it out for you! He. Is. Going. To. Kill. You.”

“He’s going to kill one of us. Not necessarily me. We need to look out for everyone as best we – ”

“It’s you, dude! It’s always you! Who died on the last mission we got sent on by Ellimist? You. Who died in that time travel thing with the Amazon jungle? You.”

“The Sario rip had nothing to do with Ellimist or Crayak,” Jake protested.

“Oh, no, I’m sure it didn’t. I’m sure that in this weird world where time travel is basically impossible and when it is possible people usually don’t survive to tell about it, according to Ax, our little group that everything weird seems to happen to also just happened to be the exact people to accidentally do it. Yep, no weird time aliens involved there, I’m sure. And you died.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to stick very well,” Jake snapped, “because here I am.”

“That’s because Ellimist sets up stupid riddle tests that he wants us to solve! But this time? This time, it was pretty damn clear. Crayak, the evil dude who you already know is fixated on you, wants the life of an Animorph. No half-measures there. He’s fixed on you, and you always die in these things, and here we are, and I’m begging you, man, to take this seriously and let us protect you.”

“Then which Animorph life would you give him instead?” Jake asked. “Yours? Cassie’s? Does Rachel or Tobias or Ax or David deserve to die for this?”

“Do you deserve to die for this?”

“Somebody’s going to. Maybe me, maybe you; I don’t think we can say we know who it’s going to be. But when you’re telling me you want to save me in particular, you know what you’re saying, right?”

“We do know it’s you, Jake! Pay attention! You said yourself, you were the first one to meet him, way back when you were a controller! He was interested in you!”

Jake shrugged. “He noticed me because I was there. He would have noticed anyone who’d been tied up in that cabin. He noticed me because he saw Ellimist’s attention on us, remember?”

“Yeah, I do remember. I remember Ellimist explaining that, and it seemed really weird, so I checked my notes. And you know what? I was right.”

“About what?”

“About that whole controller thing happening _before_ we ever met Ellimist.”

Jake frowned. “That can’t be – ”

“It is. We met him during the Kandrona mission. That was after the hospital mission, where you fell in that hot tub. So unless you think Ellimist has been stalking us for longer than we thought… no. Crayak found you. And he’s going to kill you, and you’re just _sitting there_ and _letting it happen_.”

I retreated out of earshot and called, <Hey, is anyone else here? And if so, does anyone know where ‘here’ is?>

Jake and Marco both looked up, scanning the sky. They saw me approaching; Jake waved to get my attention.

 _Where’s Rachel?_ He mouthed.

<No idea. I can only see you guys.> I scanned the area. Yep, just a bunch of grubby soldiers milling around rafts. Whatever was going on, everyone looked pretty nervous about it.

A man strode over towards Jake and Marco. Everything from his confident bearing to his expensive-looking jacket screamed _I am in charge_. He looked them up and down, unimpressed, while they endeavoured to look old enough to be there.

“What are you two lazy louts standing around for?” he snapped. “There’s work to be done! Get to it!” Then he strode off again.

Jake and Marco stared after him, mouths hanging open. They broke into low, frenzied conversation.

<What is it?> I asked, still skimming the group for Animorphs. <Is he our controller, do you think?>

<I hope not!> Marco said. <That was George Motherflipping Washington! George Washington yelled at us! He called us lazy!> This was, apparently, brilliant news.

<Congratulations?> I tried.

<Is anybody here?> came Ax’s polite voice.

<Ax! Where are you?> I asked.

<Following a river from the sky. There are many soldiers here. One of them called it ‘Delaware’.>

Jake’s face lit up. He grabbed Marco’s hands and said something very excitedly, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a little girl being told her favourite pop idol was not only in town, but visiting her school.

<Delaware?> I asked blankly. Jake looked up at me in surprise. I tried to recall everything I’d been forced to learn about wars. <Washington, Delaware… this is, um, the Civil War?>

Jake’s expression told me, no, this was not the Civil War.

<Shit, no, that’s Lincoln. Revolutionary War, right? Yeah,> I added, trying to convey through tone that I’d known all along.

Jake opened his mouth, then closed it again. He closed his eyes and focused, as if morphing, but his appearance didn’t change all that much. I recognised what he was doing – morphing another human, probably, just enough to get thoughtspeak without having to make too many major changes.

<Great, let’s kick some butt for America,> Rachel cut in. <David’s with me, by the way.>

<And where is that?> Marco asked.

<We’re a couple of guys loading stuff onto boats right now. I don’t know what else to tell you.>

<Then we’re just missing Tobias,> I said.

<I see him,> Ax said.

< – and the Delaware River and you think ‘oh, maybe it’s the Civil War’? Civil War? Really?> Jake suddenly cut in. <It’s George Washington crossing the Delaware to surprise the Hessian forces; why would there be Hessians in the Civil War? The Articles of Confederation haven’t even been sent off for ratification yet, let alone the – >

<Can we have a history lesson later?> Rachel asked. <It’s just that we all seem to be getting on rafts and it would be nice to know what our next step is.>

<I would also like to know what the hell we’re supposed to be doing here,> David said. <Protect George Washington, I suppose?>

<Okay. Okay. David, Ax and Tobias in the air; Cassie and Marco on a raft; me and Rachel on another one.>

<Well, you’re not going to be able to get on my raft unless you like swimming,> Rachel said. <We’re already in the water.>

<Why are you already on a – you know what? Who cares. So long as we’re all present when things go to hell, who even needs a plan?>

Marco spied Washington again amongst the throng of soldiers and headed after him. Jake didn’t even try to stop him.

I could cross as a bird, like Tobias and Ax, but I needed to talk to Jake. I found somewhere to demorph, morphed to lighten my skin enough not to draw any weird looks (it was getting pretty dark; I shouldn’t need any more disguise than that), and stole a big coat from someone. I had to run to make Jake’s boat before it got pushed into the water, but I made it just in time; I waded knee-deep in the icy water and Jake pulled me aboard.

From Jake’s reaction to where we were, I supposed that this was a big, glorious moment in American history. It didn’t feel glorious. It felt like a bunch of hungry, tired men huddled on wet rafts in an icy drizzle, half-expecting to die. Everyone kept as low and quiet as they could. On our raft, two guys used big poles to guide us through the water while everyone else stared grimly ahead.

I found Jake’s hand with mine and squeezed it. He squeezed back. We didn’t look at each other and we definitely didn’t dare speak out loud. Instead, I said privately, <Jake, you need to back off.>

<What?>

<With Rachel. Ever since that other world you’ve been trying to chain her to your hip. She’s a bit messed up from the orphanage thing, but she’s going to notice eventually.>

<Me and Rachel? It’s my job to protect the team. Why don’t you have this discussion with Ax? He’s been following David around like a lost puppy since he nearly killed him in that other world.>

Had he? I considered this, and decided it wasn’t that important. Ax liked protecting people and David liked attention. Nothing bad was going to happen there while they got over their experiences. Jake and Rachel, though, were another story. Rachel was basically a walking explosion, and if you tried to contain an explosion, you just made it stronger.

<Look, I know how you feel,> I said. <That other world wasn’t a great place. We fight and get hurt and risk death all the time, and then we demorph and not even a scar remains. It’s all just wiped clean, nothing but a memory, and that can really do someone’s head in. When the scars are hidden, it’s easy to forget how much damage has been done. It’s easy to forget how dangerous something actually was. I can see how, being confronted with her in the orphanage, carrying scars and obvious damage like that… how it kind of makes things hit close to home. And you’re the leader, being told one of us is definitely going to die, and – >

Jake was staring at me. <That’s what you think is going on?> he asked. <You think I’m rattled by a handful of scars? Really?>

<It’s pretty confronting.>

<Cassie, the lack of scarring has never been an issue for me. I’ve never forgotten that what we’re doing is dangerous. Every time I look at an Animorph, I see the wounds from when I last put them in danger. I don’t let myself forget; I can’t. Being confronted with damage and risk is nothing new. Even this whole Crayak price is nothing new, because frankly, with all the risks we’ve taken, I can’t understand how we went this long without losing somebody.>

I frowned. <Then what’s the problem?>

<Seriously? You’re going to sit there and ask me that? You were there! You saw what happened! Rachel was taken away and put in that awful place and had those horrible things done to her, just for existing! And all I could feel was anger at _her_ for making _my_ life slightly less convenient! I told… I told her I wished she was dead!>

<No, you didn’t,> I said, trying to keep up.

<Yes. Yes I did.>

<No, that other Jake said that to another Rachel. He had your kandhan, so far as we can tell, but different ravhan. He wasn’t you.>

<I don’t know what that means, but yes, he was. He was me with a different upbringing. ‘Oh, no, it’s okay if you’re a truly vile person, it was your parents’ fault, your school’s fault, your society’s fault’? I’m still the person who said and did and felt those things, Cassie, and changing the world around us doesn’t change the facts.>

<Of course it does. He doesn’t exist! Even if we fail at this whole thing, with our personal selves protected from the effects of the Time Matrix, he’s never going to exist! No matter what! You don’t need to atone for his crimes, Jake.>

<It’s that easy for you, is it? You don’t think about the things you did in that other world?>

<That’s right,> I lied. <I haven’t thought of her at all.>

<So the fact that we were capable of being like that – >

<Is about the best piece of news we’ve gotten in this whole mess.>

Jake stared at me. He was doing that a lot.

<Look,> I said, <some people believe that a person is born with a nature and they can’t change it. You’re born valuable or worthless, good or evil, right or wrong, and that’s it. Good is good without trying; evil is evil no matter what they do. Do you think that’s true?>

<Of course not. It’s what people do that’s good or evil, and a person chooses their actions for themselves.>

<And we have actual, real-world proof that that’s true. The Jake and Cassie raised in that world were such fundamentally different people than we are. The fact that we could have been that bad, that different, to the people we are? That’s great! We’re not those people, and we had the potential to be them – that proves that people can change and grow and be different in different circumstances!>

<It proves that morality is meaningless and at the whim of the environment.>

<No, it proves that an individual’s viewpoint and personal morality is influenced by their environment. What were you hoping for, that people are free to choose their own paths except for us Animorphs, personally, who would be magically impervious to doing wrong in any world? A person’s personality and viewpoint being affected by their environment on such a fundamental level is great, because we can change people’s environment!>

<Then what’s the difference between the people we were in that place, and the people we risk our lives every day to fight against?>

<Nothing, Jake. That’s my entire point. We could be as bad as the Yeerk Empire, which is why we need to think about everything we do. And the yeerks of the Empire… well, there are already yeerks like Aftran and Illim out there.>

Jake looked at me sharply. <You want to… reform the Yeerk Empire?>

<They’re trying to take over our planet, so I don’t think that’s really going to be an option. But if the opportunity comes up, I’m going to damn well try.>

Jake suppressed a laugh. A soldier shot him a look which he ignored. I don’t think I’d convinced him, but at least for the moment, he wasn’t thinking of the other Jake.

Then the gunfire started.


	10. Chapter 10

_Popopopopop! Popopopopop!_

<Hessians on the shore!> Tobias warned, slightly too late.

The gunfire didn’t sound like modern gunfire. These were old guns, slow to load, slow to fire, slow bullets. But if we got hit, they’d kill us just the same. For now, the bullets mostly hit the water ahead of us in lines of tiny splashes, but they’d get more accurate as we got closer.

All around us, men were busy loading weapons of their own. This turned out to be quite an involved process, where gunpowder had to be poured down the barrel and tamped down before the shot could be put in. The ever-present water was not, it turned out, helpful to the situation.

<Was this drizzle here when this was done for real?> Marco asked. <In our timeline, I mean?>

“We’ve been betrayed!” someone shouted.

“Turn back!”

“Advance!” boomed Washington’s voice. We kept moving forward.

“They’re not supposed to be here, right?” I asked Jake. “This was supposed to be a surprise attack, you said?”

“I guess we know what our controller wanted to change here,” he replied through gritted teeth.

The soldier next to me, halfway through loading a weapon, jerked and fell forward. The back of his head was missing. Somebody else kicked his body into the water, snatched up his gun and shoved it into my hands.

“What are you sitting about nattering for? Shoot!”

I had absolutely no idea how to use the weapon. I handed it to Jake, who looked equally baffled.

We didn’t have much time to figure it out; we were nearly to the opposite shore. Men were jumping out of the boats into waist-deep water and running at the enemy, thrusting bayonets forward. I jumped into the water and was almost immediately pushed over by the flow; Jake grabbed my hand and we ran, ran into the darkness, staying away from soldiers as best we could until we found a shallow ditch to drop into.

We lay there on our stomachs in the mud, barely concealed by a handful of bushes, panting. Around us was the chaos of war. Somewhere in the mad dash, Jake had dropped the gun; it had probably been too wet to use anyway. We demorphed all the way, while we had the time.

“Do you know the worst part?” Jake asked.

“Hmm?”

“I don’t even know what test she failed. Rachel, in the orphanage.”

This again? “Jake, is this really the time to – ”

“I assume I knew. The me in the other world, that is. But the couple of days of memories I have don’t have it, because in that time I didn’t think of it. It wasn’t important. All that mattered was ‘the government said she was worthless, so I wish she was dead and couldn’t inconvenience me’. Without even bothering to think about what was supposed to be so wrong about her.”

“Seriously, Jake, you’re going to have to let this go. Even just temporarily. We kind of have a big mission here. Can you forget the other Jake existed until we have that Time Matrix and feel guilty later?”

“Rachel might not be alive later,” He said. “Or you.”

“Or you,” I said quietly. He just smiled. I narrowed my eyes. “Jake, you’re not – ”

“I’m not suicidal,” he said. “I promise, Cassie, I’m not just going to walk off a cliff or something stupid like that. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Good. Because out of everyone, we need you the most.”

“We should get out of here,” he said abruptly, rising. “Kill some Hessians.”

“This isn’t our fight, Jake,” I said, pulling him back down.

“Not our fight? This fight is pivotal in the creation of America!”

“And, like King Henry, it can be cleaned up later. Our job is to find that controller. You just promised me you weren’t suicidal, and now you’re, what, just going to walk out into Hessian gunfire? You can’t die for – ”

“Then who should, Cassie?” he snapped.

Oh.

This was bigger than shame over a headful of memories from an alternate Jake. This was bigger than wanting to protect the cousin he remembered so thoroughly betraying.

Jake had made A List.

Of course he’d made a list. That was his job. At some point since agreeing to the price of this adventure, while planning out our actions as much as he could, Jake had had to face the inevitable truth – he was guaranteed to lose an Animorph, and there might be a situation where it was his order, his split-second decision on who to protect, that chose which Animorph it was. We all fought the war, we all dreaded losing our friends and felt responsible for our planet, but Jake felt responsible for the lives of the other Animorphs in a way that the rest of us usually didn’t have to think about. Which meant that somewhere in the back of his mind he’d had to ask the question – _if the situation comes up where I get to make the choice… who dies? Who are the least valuable Animorphs?_

I had no idea how he’d even go about making such a list – who won out between Rachel’s boundless courage and Marco’s ruthless pragmatism? My knowledge of biology and psychology, and David’s knowledge of intelligence and statecraft? Tobias’ sheer dedication and constant surveillance, or Ax’s alien knowledge and military discipline? And there were other factors he’d have to consider, too – which Animorph would impact the group to lose the most or the least, on an emotional level? Which would impact him, personally, the most or the least? There was no correct way to prioritise Animorphs, no order that those names could go in that wouldn’t feel like the worst betrayal ever to simply decide on, even if an actual life-or-death choice never came up. All that, with the lingering memories of the Other Jake.

I must have been staring, because Jake was looking at me weird. I scooted forward, wrapped a hand behind his head, and kissed him.

“Okay then,” he said breathlessly.

“Listen to me,” I insisted. “The Animorphs are fucking amazing. We’re chasing an enemy slaver through time to make sure America gets born and using our magic alien animal shapeshifting powers to steal his time machine. That’s, like, every awesome comic book and movie ever, all rolled into one. So we’re going to go out there, we’re going to win the day, fix the world, destroy the Time Matrix, and get back to the general kicking of yeerk butt. Later, there’ll be time to sit around and mope about the nature of evil and the responsibilities of leadership but right now, Fearless Leader, we don’t have the time or energy for anything but sheer, overwhelming, buttkicking awesome. Alright?”

“Right,” he said, still unable to find his breath. “We should… we need to find the Time Matrix. It’s a giant silver egg, about so big.” He held his hands about two feet apart.

“Okay. Time to find a giant silver egg. Birds?”

“We’ll get shot. Flies, to get away from the chaos.”

I nodded and focused on the morph. My speech had worked, apparently; hopefully he wouldn’t realise it was garbage until we had time to relax. It was enthusiastic garbage, at least.

We’d all had a lot of practice at morphing during our war, but morphing a fly was always going to be gross. I tried not to be bothered as my skin began to harden and my eyelids melted into my face. My eyes bulged and segmented into compound eyes that would show me everything, whether I wanted to see it or not. I had a great view of my own fingers shrivelling away. A great view of the bushes above me trembling in the breeze.

A great view of Jake, still almost entirely human, as he jerked, stiffened, and fell forward, still smiling as he landed in the mud. A great view of the huge part of his head that was just… missing.  
  
“Jake?” I said, the name garbled by my hardening face.

No response.

“Jake, you need to keep morphing! You have to heal!”

He didn’t move. The hole in his head stayed stubbornly huge.

“Jake! Morph! Jake!”

<Jake?!> Tobias’ voice. <Oh my god, guys, Jake’s...>

“He can still morph!” I screamed, but my words were so garbled that even I couldn’t understand them. “It was just one bullet! One bullet! We’ve been shot before; we’ve been Draconed before! Heal, Jake; you have to – ”

And then the world changed, and I was fully human again, dressed in a leotard and kneeling somewhere dark, confined, and dry.

Alone.


	11. Chapter 11

There had been no time for goodbyes. No chance for noble sacrifices or difficult decisions about who should live or die. Jake had been alive, and then he had been dead, because of one stray bullet that couldn’t even have been meant for him. A tiny fragment of lead had taken down an Animorph.

It could have been me. I’d been right next to him. It could have been me, and it wasn’t.

I didn’t know how I felt about that. I could figure it out later.

A quick glance around with some hurriedly morphed owl eyes told me that I was in a janitor’s closet. Not only was I clean and dry, I didn’t seem to be in a war zone. I demorphed the eyes, cracked the door open and peeked out.

I was in a school.

Not my school. But the hall of rooms full of ordered desks was unmistakeable. Old-fashioned desks, with wooden chairs; still in the past, then. Hard to know how far back.

If I wandered the halls in spandex, I was bound to bump into someone with awkward questions sooner or later. I snuck outside, morphed bird, and lapped the building. Not many classrooms, as it turned out; a lot of lecture halls. Several labs. Might be a high school, but probably a college.

<Anyone… anyone around?> I called. It was hard to be sure, but it had seemed like some people had more time to look around than others whenever we followed the Time Matrix, meaning we might be getting scattered a little in time as well as space. I could be the first person to arrive.

<I’m here,> Tobias answered. <Oh, I see you. Osprey, right? At least I think I’m seeing an osprey. These eyes are awful.>

<Where are you?>

<See the big brick building?>

There was indeed a brick building. I looked. Tobias was waving an orange tie out of a window. He’d morphed his old human body which, still being thirteen, looked dwarfed by the school uniform he was wearing. I headed over.

The room was a dorm room. Tobias put together a second uniform while I demorphed. It fit me only slightly better.

“Where are we?” I asked, trying to figure out how to tie a tie, then giving up. Rachel could fix it.

“The California Institute of Technology,” he replied. “It’s at least nineteen thirty, maybe a bit later.” He handed me a textbook, open to the front page with all the publishing details, and tapped the ‘copyright 1930’ notice. “Check this out.” He flipped to another page, titled “THE REBELLION OF THE AMERICAS”. I skimmed it. Washington dead, forces broken at Delaware after a traveller warned locally stationed troops of a surprise attack. Territories secured for the Crown within the year. There was a lot of stuff about treaties and taxation and embargoes that I didn’t understand. I nodded, and handed the book back.

“So,” Tobias said.

“So,” I agreed.

We stood in silence for a bit.

“I’m sorry, Cassie.”

“You lost him, too. He was your leader. Your friend. I know how much you admired him.”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend, though.”

“Yeah.” I tried the tie again. Unsurprisingly, I had not magically learned how to tie them in the past minute.

“We should figure out why we’re here,” Tobias said, tucking the history book under his arm. “If we hurry, the yeerk might not have found a local host yet. He might be running around covered in mud and wearing Washington-era clothes.”

“Let’s hope.” I followed him out. The California Institute of Technology, early nineteen thirties – what could that be about? What needed to be changed here, that would turn our America into that other world’s Empire?

The Delaware thing had probably killed off the United States, at least in name. But the name wasn’t really important. An English colony in the Americas could have the same rights and freedoms as an independent nation; a nation who later finds independence through diplomacy could develop it as easily as one who finds it through war. The differences between the individualist, freedom-loving nation I’d been raised in and the oppressive we-kill-and-enslave-for-the-greater-good one that this yeerk was creating were differences that wouldn’t be found in any map of country names or territory lines or list of whom was paying what taxes to whom. History wasn’t “here is a war with Good Guys in green and Bad Guys in red and you get the Good Nation if green wins and the Bad Nation if red wins”. It was a lot more complicated than that; complicated in ways that I, with little to no knowledge or interest in the subject, couldn’t even begin to put together.

This wasn’t my skill set. This was what Jake was good at. This was what Jake… had been good at.

And it was easier to put the pain aside this time. I’d done the bulk of my grieving on Iskoort. I’d been emotionally paralysed, useless; this time, I was thinking and moving. Was that a bad thing? Did I love Jake less, somehow, with being able to compartmentalise being the proof of that? Or was it a good thing; I’d already been through it once, and could get back to work, actually try to complete the mission he’d paid for with his life?

Or maybe it was her; the memories of the other Cassie lurking in my mind. I hadn’t been completely honest with Jake when I’d said I didn’t think about her. When someone’s been a part of you, they linger. Like Aftran, parts of her stayed with me.

Not her politics, of course. Aftran’s worldview stuck with me because it was new and useful; the other Cassie had believed mostly garbage that I’d had to confront and debunk by the time I was ten. Frankly, I was a little bothered that something as simple as depriving me of a good environment could have turned me into such a narrow-minded political idiot, but being surprised by that was the same arrogance I’d berated Jake for. ‘Oh, yes, of course people are a product of both nature and nurture, but my nature makes me inherently aware of the world, not like everyone else.’

The other Cassie had had a lot of other traits I admired. Self-confidence, for one – she didn’t waste time wondering if she was an adequate or useful person. She had the paperwork to prove that she was. Discipline, too; the other Cassie hadn’t wasted time with self-pity or emotional waffling. She had a job, she did the job, petty personal concerns were dismissed. That, I supposed, was what I was doing, leaving Jake to worry about later. So was that a good thing or a bad thing? Why did I feel a bit… well, guilty… about doing the same thing I’d just admired her for doing?

See, there it was – a complete lack of self-confidence. Other Cassie would have put the whole issue behind her and moved forward. I could never seem to just move forward.

We found Rachel and Marco wandering around outside the building.

“Ax and David are in the library,” Marco said. “They’re trying to figure out what’s supposed to change here, but so much has already changed that that’s going to be pretty tricky. Have you guys seen Jake?”

I didn’t meet his eyes. Tobias stepped forward.

“Jake got shot,” he said. “He’s dead.”

Marco paled. “Oh, I fucking knew it. I told him to be careful.” He turned away to survey the area, probably hoping we wouldn’t notice the tears in his eyes.

Rachel pulled me into her arms. “Oh, Cassie, I’m so sorry.” She tried to be gentle, but her fingers dug into my back, curling with the force of the grief and fury she had to be hiding. Hiding for my sake. Acting like this loss was mine alone.

I let her hug me. What was I supposed to say? ‘It’s fine’? Of course it wasn’t fucking fine; Jake was dead. I wanted to shake her, wanted to yell at her that she was just like Tobias, acting like this was a personal tragedy for me, like I was the one who was supposed to be sad for everyone. I was always the one who was supposed to be sad for everyone. Jake was her cousin! Marco’s best friend! At least Marco had the decency to tear up! We were close now, very close, but until two and a half years ago, Jake had been a passing acquaintance of mine. He’d known Marco and Rachel since he was a toddler. Why was I the one who was supposed to fall apart? Because we kissed? Because we’d decided we were boyfriend and girlfriend? Because we’d always been there for each other, the steady rock for the other to cling to in the tumultuous storm of the war, a safe constant in –

The other Cassie was watching me, judging me, in my mind. It did no good to tell myself that she was only a handful of disjointed memories. I pushed Rachel away.

“We need to find out what’s happening here,” I said.

“Well, you’re welcome to try, but we found dick,” David said, strolling over with Ax closely behind him. Like the rest of us, they’d stolen uniforms. “Nothing’s happening here,” he said. “By which I mean, a lot is happening here, and we don’t know which part we’re supposed to care about.”

“This world has some interesting new foods,” Ax added, wiping some kind of sauce off his mouth, “but the method of information recording is not easily searchable.”

“Ax, what did you eat?” I asked.

“How different is this history from what’s in your World Almanac?” Marco asked.

“Has anyone seen Jake?” David asked.

I walked away from the group, letting the others explain. I was so lost in my own thoughts that I barely noticed the two young men smoking in a gap between buildings until I nearly ran into them.

They looked to be in their early twenties; pale-skinned, clean-cut, wearing the same uniform as I was, although a lot better fitted. One black-haired, one blond, they looked like a walking school poster except for the cigarettes they both held, dropping ash onto the ground. They looked as surprised by me as I was by them.

“Who in God’s name are you?” the blond one asked.

“Someone who took a wrong turn,” I said, making to turn around. “’Bye.”

“Hey! I’m talking to you!” he said. He grabbed my wrist.

“Hey now, this isn’t Alabama, Davis,” his friend said nervously. “You can’t just – ”

“I know how to deal with coloureds, Friedman. Most likely this is some kind of runaway slave.”

“Out here? Look, a lot of weird stuff’s been happening today, but – ”

“What kind of weird stuff?” I asked, pulling my hand out of the man’s grip.

“Shut up,” Davis said. Then, like some vile punctuation, he added a word I won’t repeat.

I froze. What I should have done was turn around and walk away, like I’d planned. It wasn’t the first time I’d been called awful things by racists and it wouldn’t be the last. But I’d had a pretty tough day. I could still see Jake’s open skull in my mind. I looked up at Davis. It should be hard to get in the face of someone a full head taller than you, but I managed it.

What I wanted to do was say something clever like, “Oh, you don’t like black people, Mr Davis? That’s okay, I can turn white.” And then I’d turn into a polar bear and threaten to eat his face off. That would be great. But I knew I couldn’t do something that absurdly reckless here, because I didn’t have a polar bear morph.

So I punched him in the face instead. Somewhat less clever.

“Now,” I said to Friedman, morphing away my broken fingers while Davis fell back against the wall of the building, sinking to his knees and spitting up blood, “what kind of weird stuff?”


	12. Chapter 12

Friedman swallowed. He looked from his friend, to me, to someone behind me.

“Holy shit,” David said, answering the question of who he was looking at. “Hit him again!”

“Not unless he tries to get up,” I said pointedly to the miserable pile on the ground. My fury was already being replaced with contempt. It had been one punch. A jaw punch, at that; no chance of brain injury. He’d spit out a couple of teeth, but the most I could’ve done to him was broken his jaw; he still had a body full of mostly perfectly serviceable bones and there he was, acting like he was down for the count. “Mr Friedman, I asked you a question.”

Friedman opened his mouth. Then he closed his mouth. I glanced impatiently at the other Animorphs assembled behind me. They shrugged.

“There was another vagrant on campus earlier,” he blurted. “I mean, not that I’m saying you’re...” he stepped back.

“Another vagrant?” I asked gently. Davis looked to be getting up, so I stood on his hand until he screamed. “What did they look like?”

“A filthy man in a big leather coat. He went to Doctor Sampson’s office. We heard a struggle, but… look, I know we should have reported it, but Doctor Sampson was fine! He came out of the office, whistling!”

“And the vagrant?” Ax asked. “Va-va-vaaa-graaan-tuh?”

“I don’t know. We didn’t see him. But, I mean… it wasn’t our affair! There was no reason for us to – ”

“Thank you for your help,” I told him.

“This isn’t your affair either,” Rachel added. “You didn’t see us.”

We Animorphs turned and walked away.

“How do we find this Doctor Sampson?” Tobias asked.

“I already searched the teacher registry,” Ax said. “He is a professor of physics. He looks like – ” He closed his eyes and sent us an image. It was blurry and inconsistent, images being really hard to send via thought-speak, but I could make out the basics; middle-aged, with mousy brown hair and kind, light-coloured eyes.

“We should search,” Marco said.

“Yeah,” Tobias said.

We all stood, waiting. Waiting, I realised, for Jake to sort teams.

I grabbed the nearest Animorph’s wrist and marched off. My partner, who turned out to be David, said, “I think the physics building is to the East. His office should be there.”

I modified my direction accordingly.

“Look,” David said, “about Jake – ”

“This really isn’t the time,” I said.

“I know. I just… look, I know if you guys got to pick who to throw under the bus, it’s pretty obvious how that would go down. So I get it if you’re angry at me or whatever. But we didn’t get to pick, and we all knew the risk we were taking when we signed up for this little adventure.”

I didn’t respond. If we searched the office, what were we likely to find, aside from the body of a Hessian shoved in a closet somewhere?

“What I’m trying to say is,” David continued after a moment, “it’s how he would have wanted to go. Giving his life to save the world. And knowing one of us was going to die, possibly giving his life to save you, too.”

Friedman hadn’t mentioned a large silver egg, so the yeerk must have hidden the Time Matrix before switching hosts. Meaning that we weren’t going to find it in the office. We might find clues to his plan, which could help us anticipate his location, but did we have time before he used the Matrix again? How long would his current mission take?

The offices in the physics building should be easy to find. The problem was that the building wasn’t nearly as empty as the other parts of the campus I’d seen; students were milling about outside, and I didn’t have any young adult human morphs. David, apparently, did; by the time we made it to the building, he blended right in. As for me, I just morphed Rachel – she was white, and she was tall enough to sort of almost pass as a young adult if I stood up straight. Well, maybe not. But nobody asked questions, anyway.

I still didn’t completely blend in. There weren’t very many girls among the student body. A few, but not many. We asked a passing student where Doctor Sampson’s office was and were given direction. No sweat.

“So do we have a plan if he’s, uh, in his office?” David asked.

“He got Jake killed,” I said coolly. “This whole thing is his fault. We don’t want to be stranded in this time, so we shouldn’t do anything that stops us from finding out where the Time Matrix is, not until we’ve found said Time Matrix. But he has something we need, and he got Jake killed. That’s the plan.”

“Wow. I kind of like this new you, Cassie.”

 _New you_. The other Cassie lurked in my mind, not doing anything – it was a couple of days’ worth of memories, not a person – but just kind of… fitting with the idea that you did what needed doing.

He wasn’t in his office. We both demorphed as soon as the door was closed, ready to put on claws or teeth as soon as anything went wrong. The office was a mess; he hadn’t bothered to clean up after the struggle. Papers were strewn about and a wooden chair lay cracked in half, smeared with blood. One leg of the heavy oak desk looked ready to break right off with a strong enough kick. A space had been cleared on said desk (apparently by just pushing everything onto the floor), and in that space sat an address book. I picked it up. Edwards, Eddingstein, Epsworth… none of the names jumped out at me as being historically significant. I handed it to David, who skimmed it and shrugged.

“Do you hear yelling?” he asked.

I did hear yelling. A man was having an argument in a nearby office. Whoever he was arguing with was replying too quietly for me to hear.

“I’m telling you, he was meant to arrive today! You had to have heard of him, you arranged the office space! No, I don’t… yes, he was born in Germany, but he lives… what kind of mucky physics department is this?!”

A door slammed, and angry footsteps stomped down the corridor. We ducked under the desk, just in case – sure enough, the office door slammed open, then closed. If was only then that we both realised that we’d chosen the worst hiding spot in the entire office as Doctor Sampson, predictably, circled around behind the desk to sit down.

He spotted us immediately. I put on a brave smile and tried not to look like a black teenage girl in an oversized stolen college uniform lurking suspiciously in a teacher’s office.

“The, uh… the door was open?” David tried.

The professor’s eyes widened. He pointed a trembling finger at me, then David. “I knew it!” he hissed. “I knew that was thought-speak in England! Andalites!”

I grinned uncertainly. “I don’t know what – ”

“How many of you are here? How are you following – ? No, it doesn’t matter! You can’t catch me! You can’t stop me!” With the disregard of somebody in a borrowed body they don’t plan on keeping long, he kicked at the desk’s wobbly leg, knocking it off and collapsing the very heavy wood on top of us. The wood pressed down sharply, knocking the back of my skull and slamming my face into the floor, as he jumped on it, then bolted for the door.

My vision was swimming, and something in my upper chest or shoulder wasn’t working right… broken collarbone, maybe? It took nearly a minute to drag ourselves out from under the wreckage. David, as blood-streaked as I was, helped me to my feet.

“How did he know?” I mumbled. “We weren’t in morph. How did we give ourselves away?” Thoughts were hard to put together.

“It’s nineteen thirty three,” David said urgently, like this was important. “It has to be, right?”

“Does it?” I blinked, trying to assemble the two Davids in front of me into one David.

“Early nineteen thirties! Physics department!” he exclaimed, making even less sense than my own thoughts. “But his name’s not in the book, and whoever the yeerk was arguing with hadn’t heard of him either! Of course he wouldn’t be here, after all the changes; he might not even exist any more! He might still be in Germany! Cassie, I know what the yeerk’s trying to – ”

And then the world, once again, changed.


	13. Chapter 13

Around me, chaos reigned. There was fire, somewhere. I could smell the smoke. People were forming bucket chains and I was still woozy and bleeding. Following the Time Matrix forcibly demorphed me, usually, but it didn’t seem to do anything for my injuries if I was already demorphed. I’d lost my stolen uniform, though, torn and bloodied mess that it had been, and my morphing outfit seemed pretty much intact.

I scrounged enough focus to morph enough to heal my collarbone. Everything else could wait until I knew what was going on.

What seemed to be mostly going on was shouting. And the crying of small children; there was some of that too. The building – I couldn’t tell what kind of building – burned and collapsed around us. A boy of about six lay with his legs trapped under a fallen beam, screaming his lungs out. On autopilot, I did the job that was in front of me – try to lift the beam; morph to heal the torn muscle; succeed in lifting the beam; drag the kid out. If someone’s trapped under something heavy for too long, the last thing you want to do is free them and flood their system with old blood and toxins unless there are paramedics to deal with it, but the fire seemed the more urgent danger. One leg hung at a sickening angle; I grabbed a bit of old wood and some rags that had once been a curtain and immobilised it, moving it as little as possible. Then I dragged the kid out.

There was an ambulance already there. Not a real ambulance, but some kind of truck that had been recently spray-painted to resemble one. Whatever world I was in, it must be hell if they were out of ambulances. A woman in an old-fashioned nurse uniform that I didn’t know enough history to place took the kid from me and loaded him into the truck with a dozen others.

Two kids later, I remembered what I was supposed to be doing. “Excuse me?” I asked a man who didn’t look too busy, “but where am I? What’s going on?”

“Did you take a knock to the head, dear?” he asked, squinting into my eyes. “Why don’t you sit down away from the smoke for a bit. Can you walk alright?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”

“School got shelled, didn’t it? Bastards. Attacking little kids. I bet they were aiming for the chapel.” He pointed to a nearby building that was very fancy and was, indeed, very chapel-like. It was significantly dented and burned. “The bucket boys over there are good, but I don’t think it’d survive a third hit.”

“Shelled?” I asked, trying to keep up. “With bombs?”

“Of course with bombs! What else would they hit us with?”

<Cassie!> Tobias called. I glanced up. There, staying sensibly away from the billowing smoke, a red-tailed hawk drifted on a thermal.

“I might go sit down, actually,” I told the man, and went to find somewhere to morph.

The six of us as birds of prey on top of the chapel. It would have looked super weird, had anyone been inclined to look, but none of us wanted to be without natural weapons right then. Rachel was especially insistent on this.

<I’m going to kill him,> she seethed. <I’m going to find that controller and rip him to little itty bitty pieces. Get my cousin killed, the fucking – >

<But only after we know where the Time Matrix is, right?> Marco asked.

<Where are _we_?> I asked.

<England,> David said. <Late thirties or early forties.>

<World War 2?> Tobias asked. <Why?>

<He was after Einstein at CalTech, but Einstein wasn’t there like he was supposed to be! Why would someone go after Einstein? Does he care that much about how much physics humans know?>

<To stop humans from inventing nuclear weapons!> Rachel exclaimed.

<To stop America from inventing nuclear weapons,> David corrected.

<It’s not America,> Tobias pointed out. <It’s something else.>

<Whatever it is! Point is, right, you can’t just stop humanity from inventing something, at least not by taking out the inventors. Scientists don’t magically find stuff and advance humanity like on TV; most of the time, there are a lot of people discovering something around the same time, and it’s just a matter of who gets there first. Lots of people were trying to make nuclear weapons. If not Einstein, someone else, so it’s not about the weapons.>

<It’s about the war,> I said.

<Bingo!>

<So he tried to stop America… sorry, the Empire… from winning by trying to stop Einstein, but Einstein wasn’t there… so why are we here?>

<Are we sure he didn’t want the Empire to win? Maybe they were the other guys, and kind of absorbed America?> Tobias asked.

<My brain hurts,> I said.

<You can’t change the outcome of World War 2 with one scientist. Nuclear weapons didn’t win the war; they were a distraction for a lot of it. But they helped us to stick the landing. But there’s a lot more war, and there are several key points to hit up. Right now? We’re in the middle of one of the world’s best country-wide misinformation campaigns. The England that exists in the newspapers and personal letters and even a lot of the photos we have from this era _never actually existed_. A good chunk of their media is a huge misinformation campaign to trick Hitler about the actual state of their country and military campaigns. If I were doing this, this is exactly how I’d do it. Einstein, then England.>

We stared at him. Birds of prey are really good at staring.

<You’ve thought this through, have you?> Marco asked.

<Well, not recently. Didn’t everyone play pretend-alternate-history with their parents as a kid?>

We stared some more.

<I played with plastic dinosaurs when I was a kid,> Tobias said. <I could tell you what dinosaurs lived in North America in the late Cretaceous period.>

<No offense, Tobias,> Marco said, <but that information has never been useful to anyone ever. David, what would you do here?>

<To alter the war? There are a few options. I don’t know exactly what’s supposed to happen here and now, but my best guess would be he’s getting actual data on things to give to the enemy. After that, I’d go… hmm. Probably for the fake armies.>

<Fake… armies?>

<Yeah, you know. British Fourth or US First, probably British Fourth since that’s more likely to still exist, although without the… no, you know what, it’s going to be impossible for him to keep track of what has and hasn’t changed, and it’s not like they couldn’t easily build another fake army. Oh, you know what? I bet he’s here to assassinate Garbo!>

<That’s not a real name,> Rachel said. <You’re making stuff up now.>

<Where’s this Garbo?> Tobias asked.

<… I have absolutely no idea. He’s the best double agent ever, spying on Germany. In our timeline, anyway.>

<Wouldn’t he be in Germany, then?> Rachel asked.

Silence, for several seconds.

<So we have no idea why he’s here,> Marco summed up. <Okay, not a great start, especially since he’s going to be impossible to find in all this. But maybe if we can figure out where he’s going next – >

<Oh, that’s easy. He’s going to Bletchley Park next. Or eventually, anyway.>

<I know this one!> Rachel said, excited. <That’s where they cracked German codes, right?>

<Enigma, Lorenz, stuff like that,> David confirmed.

<What makes you think he’ll go there?> Marco asked. <How can you be sure?>

<Because, genius, do you know how hey break super complicated cyphers? The need to crack Enigma is what pushed off electronic computing. Now, I don’t know how much attention you guys were paying in that Evil World, but – >

<Humans didn’t have computers,> Tobias said. <They were just figuring them out.>

<Meaning that Bletchley Park must have been completely destroyed before it could have an impact.>

<Or never existed at all,> Tobias countered. <Different world, remember? Maybe the Enigma doesn’t exist. Maybe the Germans aren’t even the enemy in this war. Who knows?>

<I hear Dracon fire!> Ax said.

I listened. The nearby school was still a riot of noise, but much closer came the very distinctive sound of something that did not belong in this era.

_Tseeew! Tseeeew!_

It came from below us. The controller was in the chapel.


	14. Chapter 14

A bird of prey in flight is pretty stealthy. They have to be; if they can’t drop, silent and unseen, on an unsuspecting mammal or fish passing below? They die pretty quickly.

A bird of prey in flight inside a building, however, is not stealthy. Not even close. Tobias, who had had plenty of practice swooping about my barn, went ahead. David and Ax followed, trying to make the best of things, while the rest of us landed to put on some more stealthy morphs as quickly as we could.

<Rachel,> I said when I was fully leopard, <a grizzly bear isn’t stealthy.>

<Everyone’s stealthy if there’s no enemy alive to see them,> she replied, baring her teeth.

I gave up. Marco (a squirrel) and I raced ahead of her, so that at least when she alerted our prey, the rest of us would be ready to ambush him. There were a few corpses littered about the place, all of them grown men, in matching plain jackets. Holes were burned in those jackets and through their chests, some neater than others.

<Where is he?> Marco asked the bird Animorphs.

<Ground floor. In the worshipping part, you know, with all the pews? He’s… I think he’s setting up explosives.>

<He is very much in a hurry,> Ax said. <I think he may be attempting to complete his mission and leave before we find him.>

<How can you tell he’s in a hurry?> Marco asked. <He’s setting up bombs – maybe he’s just scared.>

<I know he is in a hurry because he has neglected to hide the Time Matrix. He is carrying it with him.>

We sped up.

<Let’s just attack him and grab it,> David said.

<No!> Marco said. <We’re nearly there. Wait for backup.>

<Oh, are you in charge now?>

Before an argument could break out, we entered the main area of the chapel. The place was strewn with wires leading to little boxes; bombs, I supposed. Doctor Sampson had stopped setting them and was sitting in one of the pews, contemplating the cross. A large silver egg took up the full space of his lap, faintly glowing.

<Cassie, stop!> Marco said. I hadn’t been aware that I’d been advancing. <What’s that under his foot?>

<Oh, fuck,> David said. <It’s a mine. He’s standing on a mine! He’s… got it connected to the bombs somehow.>

<He’s going to blow himself up?> I asked.

<No, he’s going to time travel away and the place will blow up behind him.>

<That’s so needlessly complicated.>

<It’s a trap. He’s waiting for us. The second he notices us, we’re all dead.>

And that was when Rachel came barrelling into the room, roaring at the top of her grizzly lungs.

<Rachel, no!> we all shouted together.

“HROOOOOAHR!” Rachel replied enthusiastically.

The Controller started, but didn’t lift his foot off the mine. He turned in his seat and shot Rachel right through the chest with his Dracon beam. “Checkmate, anda – ”

But he didn’t get any further than that, because at the sight of Rachel collapsing to the floor, a huge hole where her heart used to be, something inside me broke.

Jake had been killed by a single Colonial-era bullet. A war before our time, a random happenstance, and a small fragment of lead. A fleck of metal and an Animorph, we who had survived so many impossible things, simply didn’t exist any more. His killer wouldn’t have even known he had ever existed, let alone that he’d died. No – the man who had shot the bullet (Washington’s man, or a Hessian?) wouldn’t have known. He wasn’t the killer. This yeerk was the killer.

Which was why my teeth were at his throat before he could finish the word.

If your throat is in a leopard’s mouth, you’re dead. It’s their favourite way to kill. But my leap had been at a wonky angle and my teeth merely sliced the front of his throat open, missing both arteries; he ducked down before I could get a proper grip and I sailed overhead, landing, turning.

<Rachel!> Tobias was screaming. <Oh, god, Rachel, no!>

Distantly, I recalled that Rachel would have about three minutes before her brain died. But she’d be in too much pain and shock to be aware of anything for that time. No hope of demorphing.

I had a solid stance again. I leapt.

The Time Matrix glowed bright. The wounded controller vanished.

The world exploded.


	15. Chapter 15

We’d been so close. We’d almost been touching the Time Matrix.

Perhaps that was why we all appeared within sight of the controller, alone in a place of hot sun and endless sand. He had sank to his knees, Time Matrix on the sands in front of him while he clutched his bleeding throat. Next to me, Rachel sat bolt upright – human, and blessedly whole – and gasped. And at the sight of her, right there in the middle of one of the most important conflicts in our lives, I collapsed on the sand and started crying.

“YOU FUCKER,” Rachel screamed at the controller, bolting towards him. He looked up, already reaching for the Time Matrix, and froze at the sight of her for just a moment. Just long enough for Marco to kick the Time Matrix away like a football.

<That machine contains more power and complexity than the universe!> Ax said, sounding scandalised.

“Well, it handles terribly,” Marco said, rubbing his toes.

Rachel leapt onto the man, growling, and sank her completely human teeth into his flesh as he begged and weakly tried to fend her off. Marco and Ax pulled her away.

“Most of you are humans,” the yeerk rasped, dumbfounded. “Humans, this whole time.”

“Sorry,” Marco said with a shrug.

“You haven’t won.”

“Haven’t we?” Marco asked. “I mean, it kind of looks like we have.”

He grinned, blood leaking from his mouth. “Oh, you have me. Now what? What do you expect to do? Undo my work? Time is very, very difficult to control. It – ”

“We need to get Doctor Sampson to a critical care unit right away,” I said, trying to pull myself back together into something resembling a functioning person.

“Where?” Marco asked. “How? Nobody in his time can help him. And if we show up at home with this guy, the yeerk rats us out to Visser Three.”

“Then we arrive near the modern day, but juuuust a bit before the yeerks bring a Kandrona to Earth,” David said, meeting Doctor Sampson’s eyes.

The man paled. Or that may have been the blood loss.

“Either way, we need to do something now,” I said.

“It’s too risky to – ”

“We can’t – ”

<Cassie’s right; we – >

<He knows too – >

“OH, MY GOD!” David exclaimed. “You’re like a bunch of old women sometimes!” He kicked Doctor Sampson squarely in the side of his head. Said head jerked at an awkward angle and he fell forward, lifeless, into the sand. “There, problem solved! Now, can we discuss the _all-powerful time machine_ that just came into our possession?!”

We stared at the corpse. At David.

“What the fuck, David?!” Rachel berated him.

<Dude,> Tobias added. <Not cool.>

“What? I’m sorry, she tried to kill him as a leopard,” he said, flicking his fingers towards me, “and Rachel just tried to bite him into pieces, but I give him a quick, painless death and I’m the bad guy?”

<We are not usually in the practice of executing helpless captives,> Ax said.

“Oh, aren’t you, Ax?” David asked, staring him down. “You don’t kill helpless people, huh? Is that a new rule, as of today?”

Ax looked away with all four of his eyes.

I spoke up. “It’s not the human’s fault what the yeerk – ”

“DO NOT LECTURE ME ABOUT HUMANS AND YEERKS,” David roared. “I just spent two days with one of those fucking bastards in my head before getting thrown into this mess. He electrocuted a little girl to death with these hands, so don’t try to pull that bleeding heart ‘think of how the poor host feels’ bullshit on me. _I know better than you_. Hey, here’s a fun idea – we can all stop dogpiling on the new guy for doing the same shit everyone else was trying to do to this guy, and worry about the fucking time machine!”

I glanced at said time machine. It was just lying there, a big silver egg in the desert. Rachel picked it up.

“It doesn’t feel special,” she said.

I wandered over and put a hand on it. Did it feel very slightly warm, or was that my imagination? Did it still faintly glow, or was that just the desert sun?

<So now what?> Tobias asked.

“Now, we go back and stop him from doing everything,” David said.

“I don’t know if we can?” Rachel brushed the Time Matrix thoughtfully with her fingertips. “I mean, if you use this device, your own past is protected; like Ellimist did for us. Right? But we were at all those places.”

“I don’t think it works like that, or the yeerk wouldn’t have been able to change the America he found the device in in the first place,” Marco said.

<Side note,> Tobias said, <it’s weird that this showed up in the construction site, right? Just like everything does? Isn’t that weird?>

“Why was a controller digging around that place anyway?” Rachel asked. “What was he looking for?”

“Let me get this whole thing straight,” David said. “We can use thing to change time, but we don’t change ourselves. The world changes around us and we kind of… slot into our lives in the new world, but with all the memories and personality of the old world.”

“I… think so,” Marco said.

“So if we don’t get this exactly the same as how it was, we’re going to screw ourselves over. There’ll be stuff going on that we have no memory of. It could take years to play catch-up. I might have twelve sisters in the new world; Rachel might have none.”

“When we do this,” I asked, “we’re effectively killing and replacing alternate versions of ourselves? Is that right?”

“I don’t think there’s an alternate version of ourselves,” Marco said.

<There was in the other world,> Tobias said.

“Yes, but we weren’t there. We weren’t protected by the Time Matrix.” He frowned. “Although now that I think of it, I don’t know why that would make a difference. Since we’re kind of… entering into the new world from arrival...”

“Who’s been being us until the moment we get there?” I finished his thought. “What happened to the person who lived the first fourteen or so years of our lives before we arrive?”

<Are we usually this existential?> Tobias asked. <Ax, help.>

<I have very little useful knowledge on this topic,> Ax said.

“Why, was there a hot girl in time travel class?” Marco asked.

“Practically speaking,” David said, “we have this thing, and fixing the world is going to change something, just by our being there. It’s like a stepping-on-a-prehistoric-bug deal, right?”

<So we are going to the late Cretaceous?> Tobias asked.

“Can we all just make a promise to never ever go to any kind of time with dinosaurs?” Marco asked. “It sounds tedious and depressing.”

<Hey! Dinosaurs rule!>

“ _My point is_ ,” David continued, stubbornly pretending that no nonsense was happening, “we’re going to change history no matter what we do, right? It’s unavoidable.”

“So?” Rachel asked.

“So, let’s be surgical. What do we want to change it into?”

There was a pause.

“Wait,” Rachel said, “are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting? Bring the bubonic plague vaccine to England before it hits, stop the holocaust, destroy the trans-atlantic slave trade before it starts, give cave people antibiotics? That sort of thing?”

“Why not?” David asked. “See, I only just suggested it and in seconds you’ve got four great ideas. Think of all we could fix!”

“Or break,” I said. “Things didn’t go how that controller wanted. They probably wouldn’t go how we want, either.”

David stared at me. “Are you serious? She says, ‘let’s stop the holocaust’, and your response is ‘we can’t save all those people because some other vague thing I can’t think of might go wrong’?”

I blushed.

“I wasn’t suggesting it,” Rachel said. “I was giving an example.”

“So you don’t think we should stop the holocaust?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it again. Looked away.

<Just because we have power doesn’t mean we should be tempted to use it,> Tobias pointed out.

“Yes, it does! Of course it does! Anything less makes us the problem! If you can do stuff, what’s the reason not to? That’s exactly what we do with morphing!”

<That’s different,> Tobias said.

“How?!”

<Ellimist doesn’t want – >

“I don’t give a shit what Ellimist wants! I’ve been on this team for less than six months and he’s already screwed us over twice in that time! He tried to make us commit genocide! He couldn’t negotiate his way out of getting your precious leader killed! We told him no last time, and saved a species, but you won’t do it again for your own planet?”

“We don’t know how this Time Matrix works,” I pointed out. “Ellimist said there could be consequences that we don’t – ”

“ _We don’t know how morphing works either_!”

<I think,> Ax cut in, <that we have lost focus on the purpose of this mission.>

“Oh, have we?”

<Yes. The reason we were sent to do this was not to fix humanity’s past mistakes or give us a better ‘now’ in which to combat the yeerks. It was not even to repair the changes already made. It was to remove this device from service, to safeguard the very integrity of the spacetime continuum. The changes you suggest, while they may create admirable improvements to human history – or possibly not, given our lack of understanding of causality or the operation of this device – run contrary to the goals of our mission, which are to stop it from being used.>

“Well, we have to use it,” Rachel shrugged, “unless you want to die stranded out here in this desert. I don’t even know what country we’re in.”

<Or if we’re on Earth,> Tobias said.

<We should allow it to transport us home,> Ax said, <whatever that looks like for us in our time. Then we must hide it very well and never use it again. That is the only responsible thing to do.>

“But we have no idea what’s waiting for us at home,” I said. “Or who we’re supposed to even be there.”

“Wait,” Marco said with a grin. “We can do both.”

“Both what?”

“We can go home and never use this thing again. And we can fix our timeline, perfectly, with no weird unexpected changes to deal with.” He grinned. “I figured it out.”


	16. Chapter 16

Marco’s plan had a couple of unverified assumptions in it, but it was a good one. In fact, it was so neat, so obvious, that we all felt like idiots for not seeing it immediately.

We couldn’t confirm, but it was reasonable to assume that the two days’ worth of alternate-history memories we had were from the time when the Time Matrix was in operation. It had been used, and from the moment it had been used, Ellimist had tried to get us together so he could enlist our help. That had taken two days. So, we knew when it had first been used. We also knew where it had been found.

“All we have to do,” Marco said, “is go, say, a couple of days earlier than when it was used, and stake out the construction site. We stay out of our other-selves’ way – ”

<Would we have other selves there?> Tobias asked. <Or would we, like, replace them?>

“I don’t know! If they’re not there, we ask the chee to cover for us. Anyway, we stake it out, we watch for anyone digging up the Time Matrix, we nab them, and this whole adventure never happened anywhere outside our own memories.”

We thought about this.

<There are… less potential problems with this plan than with anything else I can think of,> Ax conceded.

“Great! Let’s go.”

We each placed a hand or talon on the Time Matrix. And waited.

“Does anyone know how to operate this thing?” Rachel asked.

We waited some more.

“It couldn’t have been that hard,” David said. “The yeerk figured it out.”

Some more time passed.

“Okay, this is stupid,” Marco said. “Let’s all just _wish really hard_ that we were at the time and place we want.”

<That’s stupid,> Tobias said, but he closed his eyes.

I visualised the construction site, empty and deserted, making sure to be clear about exactly when I wanted to be as well as where, My whole body tingled with all-over pins and needles that intensified until my skin was one unending wave of pain, then… stopped. It was chilly. A cool breeze washed over my skin.

I opened my eyes in the construction site.

“Wow, that actually worked?” Marco rubbed the static out of his arms and started to look around.

But he didn’t get very far. The device in our hands grew hot, very hot, but we were all paralysed with fascination, unable to move away. Then it sort of… collapsed in on itself, and melted away.

<That was supposed to happen, right?> Tobias asked. <Was that supposed to happen?>

“Ax, what’s going on?” Marco asked, trying not to panic.

<I would surmise that perhaps two versions of this Time Matrix cannot exist simultaneously, and one has self-destructed.>

“And the other?”

<I do not know.>

“That’s bullshit,” Rachel said, “unless you’re suggesting that the Time Matrix as built after the nineteen thirties. Otherwise it would have melted at the college, too.”

<Good point. It may be both temporally and spatially dependent.>

“Good,” I said. “Otherwise we’d have two time matrices to deal with once this was over.”

<Speaking of,> Tobias said, <is there a plan here, for surveillance? The construction site is pretty big, and we may not have very much time between our mark stumbling on the Time Matrix and figuring out what it does and how to use it.>

“We know he doesn’t use it until two days from now,” I pointed out. “Probably. If we’re right.”

“And now that we don’t have a Time Matrix of our own, I really, really hope we are,” Rachel added.

<At least we know he hasn’t found it yet, if it’s still on-site. So… teams of three? Twelve hours surveillance per day, twelve hours for sleeping and eating and stuff?>

“Teams of two,” Rachel said, “so we do eight hours per day. It is impossible to monitor a single place for twelve hours. We’d go out of our minds with boredom.”

Tobias scoffed. <Humans. Try hunting sometime.>

It was weird, not having Jake to divide teams. I went with Rachel. Monitoring the construction site turned out to be harder than it had seemed; it was a big place, and it wasn’t completely deserted. Some homeless people lived there, and there was a Yeerk Pool entrance in one of the buildings, so people came and went occasionally. It helped that even off-duty Animorphs tended to hang around the site – we didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Rachel and I were two hours into our first shift when I saw the controllers.

It was a group of four – a man, two teenage girls, and a small boy. At first I thought they were going to the Yeerk Pool entrance, but they moved furtively, jumping at every little sound. It was well past sunset, but they didn’t carry flashlights. This didn’t affect my vision as an owl, but they had to move carefully to not trip on rubble or old beer bottles. They wore scarves, hoodies or hats, like they were trying to hide their faces from casual recognition without being too obvious about it. The man and one of the teenagers carried Dracon beams. Silent and near-invisible, I opened my wings and swooped down to land as close to them as I dared, landing on some rubble about six feet away.

“Look, man, this is a lost cause,” the unarmed teenager muttered to the man. “There’s not going to be anything here. You’d be better off just throwing yourself on his mercy and – ”

“Visser Three does not have mercy!” he hissed. “The only reason I am still alive is because he does not want to kill this host. But in two and a half days, Derane, that will no longer be a problem, and the only way to get back in his good graces by then is to find something of value.”

“You have plenty of value! Remind him of that!”

“Do you think he will listen? Right now? After we went behind his back? No, this is my last hope. Humans are… sentimental. He might have left some clue here.”

<Rachel,> I called, <I’m like, ninety per cent sure I’ve found the guy. Who’s currently in the construction site, Animorph-wise?>

<We all are,> David said. <Gimme a minute to wake Ax and Tobias.>

<We might not have much more than a minute, because it’s a group of four and they’re splitting up.>

<Four controllers?>

<Yep. Judging by the pair of legs we found near that Henry V battle, my money’s on the only adult male, but we still have quite a bit of time before it’s used, so really any of them could have found it.>

The teenage girls headed for a half-constructed building where several homeless people were sleeping and started waking them to ask them about something. I highly doubted that any of them had the Time Matrix, so the girls probably weren’t going to be a problem. The little boy and the man headed off in opposite directions, scouring the ground, poking through the buildings.

<What are they looking for?> Rachel asked.

<No idea. There’s some kind of internal politics thing where this guy is on Visser Three’s bad side. That’s all I know.>

<The man’s heading down into a basement,> Tobias observed. <I can track the boy up here if you – >

<On it.> I followed him into the basement, which split off into a couple of other basements. The construction site was originally going to become a huge mall, and the base was riddled with belowground storage. Owls aren’t great in confined spaces, so I hopped behind some rubble and demorphed. There was no time to remorph properly; I walked forward as quietly as I could, morphing wolf as I went. (I wasn’t going leopard in the construction site. If I was seen, a wolf might look like a big stray dog in the dark, but a leopard in a construction site would cause panic.)

With a wolf’s ears and nose, my prey was very easy to find. By the time I was half morphed, he’d made his way to an area that was very familiar; a basement I’d been trapped in before, sheltering with the other Animorphs while we tried to figure out how to smuggle the escafil device out through a yeerk seige. This was the very place where David had become an Animorph.

About half the roof was missing. The controller, feeling safe in the basement, had cast his scarf aside. He had been scrabbling in the detritus at the covered end, and I realised as he stood up that I was too late – he held the Time Matrix in his hands.

<Guys!> I called, <he’s found it! Come quick!>

<Where are you?>

<The basement where David became an Animorph. Hurry!>

The man clearly had no idea what he had; he inspected it with curiosity, not awe. I didn’t want to attack him alone; if I startled him, he might trigger the Time Matrix by accident or something. Better to have everyone at once, so we could be sure of getting it out of his hands first try.

<Are you telling me that we were pretty much on top of the Time Matrix during that incredibly terrifying blue box thing?> David asked. <How did it even get here?>

<Ellimist did say it has a way of turning up and getting itself used,> Tobias said. <Cassie, David is coming to you in lion form; the others are a minute or two away.>

<You’re a lion in a construction site?!>

<I’m sorry, I thought the Time Matrix might be a higher priority than secrecy right now!>

“What is this?” the controller mumbled. The Time Matrix glowed bright for a moment, illuminating his face; his eyes grew wide. He stiffened.

The Matrix dimmed, but it kept glowing just a little. Just enough for me to make out the man’s expression; awe, bafflement, a man trying to understand a whole universe at the same time. He blinked hard, shook himself, and turned to climb out of the huge hole in the roof.

There, on the edge of the hole, stood a lion.

The man froze, staring. I prepared to strike. If he knew what the Time Matrix was now, we couldn’t afford the time to assemble everyone; as he’d already noticed David, there was no point. I had to jump now, even thought I was only half-morphed, and take advantage of his distraction while he stared at David.

But David was staring, too. The man adjusted his grip on the Time Matrix, the angle of the glow shifted, and I realised that his face was familiar.

David spoke. And a lot of little things that hadn’t entirely made sense over the long, weird day suddenly fell into place.

<Dad?!>


	17. Chapter 17

“David.” The man’s face broke into a relieved smile. “David, my boy. You’re okay.”

<Don’t,> David said, his lips drawing back in a snarl. <Don’t pretend to be him, you filthy yeerk. You think I’ll forget what you are? You think I don’t know what it’s like? You’re going to let him go, and then we’ll sort this out.>

“Now why, little Davey, would I do that?”

Two thought processes were running through my head. In one calculation, born of mental habits found in those two days’ worth of memories, the controller was a non-issue. His relevance was in the device under his arm; his connection to David a welcome distraction. While they talked, I could go for his throat. I was still only half-morphed, but there wasn’t time to wait; besides, I was wolf enough. Killing a middle-aged man wasn’t hard.

But the rest of me knew that this man’s identity was important. David had joined to free his parents, and if I killed his father in front of him… it would be less harmful than letting him have the Time Matrix, true, but maybe I could just leap and grab the Time Matrix? There might be a struggle. It might be risky. With a device of infinite power, I couldn’t afford risky.

But I couldn’t just kill the man, either. Not unless I had to. Especially not a teammate’s father.

I leapt for the device.

My feet slid on the loose rubble, and the controller spun to face me, making my decision irrelevant – I wouldn’t have reached the device or his throat before he jumped back out of the way, raising it to smash down on my head when I landed. David, above him and within pouncing distance, didn’t move, but just as I landed and he raised the Time Matrix –

“Tseeer!”

Tobias dived.

A red-tailed hawk diving for someone’s face is never a pretty thing. Most controllers panic, cover their eyes, and duck. This one reached out and made a grab for Tobias.

I heard Tobias’ wing snap in his grip. Ignoring the deep, freely bleeding gouges that the bird was digging into his flesh with beak and talons, the man raised him high, and slammed him down towards the rocks.

<TOBIAS!> Rachel screamed from… somewhere. I was still landing, feet scrabbling on rubble; I couldn’t do anything. David was frozen, Marco was nowhere to be seen. Tobias was pulled down, and it was obvious that the rocks would do as much for his brain as a bit of lead had done for Jake’s.

And then the tiger appeared out of nowhere, jaws clamping onto the man’s arm and biting deeply until bones snapped. The man screamed, dropping Tobias.

<You okay, Tobias?> Jake asked.

<Jake?!>

<Sorry I’m late to the party. What’s going on?>

<Oh… you know...>

At some point in the struggle, the Time Matrix had ended up on the ground. As soon as the controller’s arm was free of Jake’s jaws, he made a dive for it, but I was already on top of it, wrapping furry arms around it and trying to block as much of it as I could with my body.

<Seriously?! THREE times?!> That was Marco. <You cheat death THREE times? Are you getting frequent flyer miles for the riverman’s ferry?>

<Who cheated death?> Jake asked.

<We have multiple controllers approaching,> Ax reported. <I am pleased to see you alive and well, Prince Jake.>

<What the hell did I miss out on?!> Jake asked.

“David! David, help me!”

<Dad! The bleeding will… oh, god...>

I looked at the blood spurting from his almost-completely-severed arm; at my half-morphed, useless hands; at the Time Matrix under me. <David,> I said, <demorph and grab that scarf over there. I’m going to explain to you how to tie a torniquet.>

<You do it! You’re closer! Forget that stupid – >

<Is this really the time to argue?! The damage is to the lower arm, which gives you a lot of space to work with. Get hands and I’ll explain how to find the correct spot to – >

“Over here! They’re this way!”

<There really are quite a lot of controllers approaching,> Ax reminded us.

<David, Cassie, tourniquet that arm,> Jake said. <Everyone else, prepare to secure their retreat. There’s no way we’ll get him out of here; we’ll have to come back for him another day.>

<The yeerks will kill him,> Ax said. <That arm will have to be amputated, and they have no use for disabled hosts.>

<And we can’t leave the Time Matrix,> Marco said.

<What’s a Time Matrix?>

<How – how much do you not remember?> Rachel asked.

“That bird! That’s one of them!”

Dracon fire lanced across the sky.

<Rachel!> Jake called.

<Tobias, can you fly?> Ax asked.

<Hold on, Dad!> David urged.

His Dad was making another try for the Time Matrix. I kicked at him wildly, grabbed the egg and tried to scootch it away with half-morphed arms.

<Cassie, get it out of here!> Marco said. <we can’t let it fall into their hands! Take it and go!>

<I can’t leave!>

<That thing is more important than anything that can go wrong here!>

<Go, Cassie,> Jake said. <We’ve got this.>

Go? Go where? What was I supposed to do with the most powerful weapon in the universe?

The darkness became a disco of Dracon fire and screams.

We couldn’t hide such a thing! The escafil device was bad enough, but a Time Matrix?! We couldn’t leave it isolated or unguarded; Ellimist had said that it tended to find its way into people’s hands. We couldn’t give it to the hork-bajir; they were refugees of a conquered planet fighting to regain the freedom they’d lost, and had even more incentive to use it than we did.

<Aaargh!>

<Marco!>

<I’m alive.>

<Hork-bajir incoming.>

<Cassie, get it out of here!>

Hot-blooded rebels couldn’t be trusted with such a device. Makers of the future couldn’t be trusted with such a device. It needed a guardian with a sense of perspective, a long view, for whom the very act of interfering with what was happening around them was strange and suspicious. It needed an expert at hiding, someone without the same sort of instincts or morals as us.

Dracon fire burned a hole into the concrete above me. I felt the Time Matrix go warm as I closed my eyes and focused.

I didn’t open them again until the puppy started licking my face.

It was a Jack Russel, I think. I’m not very good with dog breeds. I was lying on my back on the grass, slowly demorphing, while the puppy licked me and an older dog sniffed at me suspiciously. Three doglike androids (canoids?) stood over me, staring.

“You’re Cassie,” one of them said. “One of the Americans fighting the yeerks. Aftran’s friend.”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t recognise the speaker, but then, I’m not very good at telling chee apart without their holograms. “Look, this is kind of a long story, but I need – ”

“Is that the _Time Matrix_?!” another exclaimed.

“Okay, maybe it won’t be a long story.”

“Won’t it? We’ve been scouring Egypt dune-by-dune for that thing and you had it? _How_?”

“I’m kind of in a hurry,” I said. “There’s a battle going on that I’m supposed to be in.”

“Cassie,” the third one said, “are you alright?”

This one had a voice that I recognised. I squinted, trying to place them physically. “Lonos?”

“Ah. Sorry, I forgot.” She flicked her Maria hologram into place, then knelt beside me and put her hands on the Matrix.

“You can’t use it,” I said hurriedly. “It shouldn’t be used; it’s – ”

“We know. We know. There is nothing to worry about here. Where did you find – if you’re in a hurry, it can wait.”

“Can you hide it?”

“Yes.”

“I owe you one. I know it’s a lot to ask but – ”

“The very last command given by our god to a living pemalite was to guard this device from use. When we realised it was missing from its hiding place, we thought we had failed in their last mission. We will not fail it again, for as long as any chee lives. You owe us nothing; it is we who owe you.” She stood up, handling the Time Matrix easily. It sat dull and lifeless in her hands, a pretty treasure of value, but no obvious power. She handed it to another chee, then helped me up. “Now. Let’s get you through Erek’s basement, so that you can get back to this battle.”


	18. Chapter 18

The battle had been quick. By the time I raced through Erek’s house, morphed wings, and made my way back to the construction site, there was nothing there but some strange burn marks and the lingering scent of fire and blood. Not even any homeless people were about, and I wondered whether they’d been dragged down to the Pool or simply silenced with a Dracon beam. I hoped the former was true. We could rescue slaves, but not corpses.

Ax was waiting for me. He told me that everyone was at Jake’s house since Tom was out at a Sharing thing and his parents were at dinner, except David (who had run off in despair after watching the yeerks vaporise his father’s corpse) and Tobias (who had been sent after him to make sure he didn’t do anything to get himself killed). They’d only been gone a couple of minutes, and Marco was still demorphing in Jake’s room when Ax and I flew in through the window.

Jake sat on the edge of his bed, watching a pacing Rachel with bafflement. She kept shooting interrogative glances at him, and I realised that this was probably how her mother looked in a courtroom.

“Okay,” she said, while I demorphed. “Spill.”

“About what? You guys are the ones who need to catch me up here! What was that egg thing? Why were we – ”

“Why don’t you know what the Time Matrix is? How were you at the construction site? How are you _alive_?”

“Why is it weird that I’m alive?”

“Jake,” I said once I could talk, “what’s the last thing you remember?”

“Um… sitting here, doing this?”

Rachel rolled her eyes.

“I mean, before showing up at the construction site? What did you do today?”

“What did I do? Well, Marco came over and we took turns playing Doom – ”

“Did I do better than you?”

“ – and then I got a call from Cassie, saying she had a super weird feeling and wanted to meet me ‘near the mall, you know, that place where we saw the weird stars’, so I went to the construction site.”

Everyone looked at me. I shrugged. “I didn’t call anyone. I was with you guys all day. Jake, then what?”

He shrugged. “By the time I showed up everyone was in morph and shouting a lot, so I put stripes on just in time to stop someone from killing Tobias and… well, you know the rest. What’s going on?”

“Jake,” Rachel asked, “does the word ‘Clearview’ mean anything to you?”

“Isn’t that a brand of mineral water?”

“So you don’t remember anything? The epic time travel adventure? That evil world?”

“The what now?”

“You don’t remember seeing me in Clearview and the things you – ”

“Did on the Delaware?” I cut in. “You don’t remember meeting George Washington?”

Rachel caught my eye. I raised an eyebrow. She nodded, very slightly.

“I met _George Washington_? What was he like?”

“It was great, man,” Marco said. “He accused us of being lazy slobs, basically. Us, personally; you and me.”

“Wow! That’s amazing!”

“I know, right? Anyway, I think I know what’s going on here, kind of.”

“You do?” Rachel asked. “Because I’ve been completely lost since Ellimist showed up.”

“Right, so – Time Matrix. It’s a paradox-free time machine, right, Ax?”

<That is _still_ a vast simplification.>

“Good enough. It protects its user, right? Whatever you do to the world, you’re still the same person, and it’s hard to be sure but based on Jake getting a phone call from Cassie I’d estimate it builds a world where there’s a place for you to exist. Ellimist gave us the same protection until we got the Time Matrix, so no matter what nonsense we got up to, we were still us.”

“We already know that much,” Rachel said.

“Right, so when Jake got shot in the head, he stayed shot in the head.”

“I got _shot in the head_?”

“Then we chase this yeerk yahoo through some more time, everyone’s protected, until we get our hands on the Time Matrix. Then, it’s over. The bargain is complete. Our protection is gone.”

“But… we’re still the same people,” I pointed out.

“Because we used the Time Matrix. We were protected by it, as part of its function, when we went back. Well… seven of us were. One Animorph wasn’t touching the Matrix.” He pointed at Jake.

“So you’re saying,” I said, frowning, “that for Jake, the whole thing didn’t happen? We undid it, and his past wasn’t protected, so it’s a part of our pasts but not a thing that exists for him?”

“Exactly!” Marco said triumphantly. “The exact opposite of the Amazon thing! Except that Jake still died. Jake, you’ve used up your free deaths; I vote that you’re banned from dying for the rest of the war. It’s somebody else’s turn.”

Jake frowned. “So did I meet George Washington or not?”

“You _did_ , but you _haven’t_.”

Jake looked at Ax.

<This… seems logical,> he admitted.

“And David’s dad – ”

“Not your fault,” I said immediately. “You saved Tobias’ life. And we did everything we could to save him.”

“I know, but...” Jake put his head in his hands. “I promised I’d save him.”

“Then we save his mother,” Rachel said. “We can at least do that.”

“Dude,” Marco said, putting a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “We can’t save everyone.”

Jake met his eyes, then looked away. “That was – ”

“Also not your fault! Jesus! I was the one who filled the Royan base with water!”

“Marco, you should talk to David,” I said. “You understand better than anyone what he’s going through.”

“He doesn’t like me.”

“You don’t like him,” Rachel pointed out.

“Because he’s a dick!” Marco said. “You should have heard what he called Tobias the other day!”

“Because your remarks with Tobias have always been super sensitive,” I noted.

“That’s different!”

<Prince Jake, your parents’ car has returned.>

Marco nodded. “We should go.” He glanced at me, then at Jake. I nodded as slightly as I could.

Once the last bird had taken off the windowsill, I closed the window and sat next to Jake on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Seems like I’m the last person you should worry about, since I missed the big adventure.”

“If it helps, you were super brave. And you looked very heroic, crossing the Delaware.”

“You’re not telling me everything.”

“Well, a lot happened. Maybe when we have time – ”

“What’s Clearview? You wouldn’t let Rachel talk about it.”

I sighed. “It’s really not as big a deal as you probably think.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s… between you and Rachel. None of my business.”

“I’ll ask her, then.”

“Yeah, I know you will. Jake, I… I’ve had to grieve for you a lot, recently. This time was worse than Iskoort in some ways, and better in others, but all round, it’s not something I ever want to see happen again. Take care of yourself, okay? Promise me that. That however you feel about David’s dad, that however the things you have to think about and the decisions you have to make as a leader shake out… please just promise me that you’ll look out for yourself from now on?”

Jake smiled at me. “Now you know how it feels.”

“How what feels?”

“When someone starts talking about how the pressure it getting to them and there are no right decisions to be made, and then vanishes without a trace in the forest one day. And then comes back, and gets trapped on a plane and goes missing.”

“Okay, fine. I vanished twice, you vanished twice. Now we’re even.”

“Technically you got caught as a caterpillar _nothlit_ which makes – ”

I kissed him to shut him up. “And you straight-up died in front of us, which is worse than disappearing on a plane, so that evens out with the caterpillar thing. We’re even, which means neither of us are allowed to disappear or die or anything like that ever again. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Jake said.

And he kissed me back.


End file.
